The fall in risk free interest rates since the 1980s has mostly been described as being induced by factors that push down interest rates from the demand side. This paper contributes to the literature by adding a view of the supply side, namely that interest has to be earned first, before it can...

In the present paper we explicitly introduce interest payments and debt into a Kaleckian distribution and growth model with an investment function very close to Kalecki's original writings. The effects of interest rate variations on the short-run equilibrium values of capacity utilisation,...

The increasing dominance of finance starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s in the US and the UK, and somewhat later in other countries, was associated with two fundamental and structural processes generating the contradictions of this phase of development and finally the financial and economic...

The labor income share has been decreasing across countries since the early 1980s, sparking a growing literature about the causes of this trend (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2014; Piketty and Zucman, 2014; among many others). At the same time, there has been a steady increase in asset prices. We build a...

The US economy is often referred to as the “banker to the world,” due to its unique role in supplying global reserve assets and funding foreign risky investment. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to analyze and quantify the contribution of this role to rising wealth...

The severity of the financial and economic crisis which started in 2007 cannot be understood without examining the medium- to long-run developments in the world economy since the early 1980s. The following long-run causes for the crisis can be identified: inefficient regulation of financial...

We document a 5 percentage point decline in the share of global corporate income paid to labor from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. Increased dividend payments did not absorb all of the resulting increase in profits, and therefore, the supply of corporate savings increased by over 20 percentage...

Our underlying hypothesis is that technological progress (even neutral) has a big effect on distribution, not only on growth, since rising waves of technical progress cause rising monopoly power. We test it by showing that, since the 1970's, information technology (in short IT) has caused rising...

We identify two undocumented measurement challenges affecting corporate sector labor shares outside the United States: the inclusion of dwellings and the inclusion of self-employed workers in the corresponding sectoral accounts. Both issues have become more important over time, biasing corporate...

We show that cross-country comparisons of corporate labor shares are affected by differences in the delineation of corporate sectors. While the US excludes all self-employed and most dwellings from the corporate sector, other countries include large amounts of both — biasing labor shares...