In this paper, we analyze the development of public consumption expenditure in Austria starting in the 1940s. We focus our attention on two hypotheses as to why public consumption expenditure has been constantly increasing: Wagner's law and Baumol's cost disease. The estimated income elasticity...

This paper contributes to the literature on majority voting over fiscal policies. We depart from the standard model in two dimensions. First, besides redistributing income, the government uses the net tax revenue to finance the provision of goods and services that become in-kind transfers to the...

This paper studies two formal models of long run growth with a medium-run distributive cycle, both of which feature causal links from the rise in inequality to a deterioration of long run macroeconomic performance. Both versions feature an endogenous income-capital ratio: one through the...

Labor's share of income has attracted interest in recent years reflecting its apparent decline. These falls, witnessed across many countries, are usually deemed undesirable. Any such assertion, however, begs the question of what is the socially optimal labor share. We address this question using...

Based on long US time series we document a range of empirical properties of the labor's share of GDP, including its substantial medium-run swings. We explore the extent to which these empirical regularities can be explained by a calibrated micro-founded long-run economic growth model with...

The relative stability of aggregate labor's share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, relative stability at the aggregate level masks the unbalanced nature of industry labor's shares - the Kuznets stylized facts underlie those of Kaldor. We present a two-sector - one...

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

The decline in the labor share has attracted the attention of economists in recent years. Empirical literature has documented that this decline can be explained by the increasing capital intensity of the U.S. economy. This paper proposes a mechanism that accounts for the increasing capital...

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

The relative stability of aggregate labor share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, relative stability at the aggregate level masks the unbalanced nature of sectoral labor shares. We present a two-sector (manufacturing and services) model with induced innovation that can...