This paper establishes some stylized facts of the long run relationship between growth and labor shares using historical data for the United States (1898-2010), the United Kingdom (1856-2010), and France (1896-2010). Performing individual country time-frequency analysis, we demonstrate the...

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job-creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run...

In the United States, labor's share of income falls after a positive disturbance to productivity growth or inflation, and it remains low for some time. Previous researchers have argued that the negative relationship between productivity growth and labor's share is puzzling. I argue otherwise. A...

This paper establishes some stylized facts of the long run relationship between growth and labor shares using historical data for the United States (1898-2010), the United Kingdom (1856-2010), and France (1896-2010). Performing individual country time-frequency analysis, we demonstrate the...

Economic theory frequently assumes constant factor shares and often treats the topic as secondary. We will show that this is a mistake by deriving the first high-frequency measure of the US labor share for the whole economy. We find that the labor share has held remarkably steady indeed, but...

In this second part of our study we survey the rapidly expanding empirical literature on the determinants of the functional distribution of income. Three major strands emerge: technological change, international trade, and financialization. All contribute to the fluctuations of the labor share,...

This series of working papers explores a theme enjoying a tremendous resurgence: the functional distribution of income — the division of aggregate income by factor share. This first installment surveys some landmark theories of income distribution. Some provide a technology-based account of...

This paper investigates the interaction of structural change and the labor share. We use a series of thought experiments that combine theoretical assumptions underlying labor markets in Baumol and Lewis with the accounting of a sectoral decomposition of the labor share. The focus lies on a shift...

We propose a novel methodological approach to disentangle the main structural shocks affecting the US labour share of income during the immediate post-war era (1948Q1- 1984Q4) and the Great Moderation (1985Q1-2018Q3). We motivate a SVAR model in aggregate demand, unemployment rate, real wage and...