Countries subject to the same degree of exposure to globalization may experience very different levels of economic insecurity depending on social support or employment protections provided by the state or even due to insurance obtained by households. We identify five varieties of industrialized...

We examine what determines differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the OECD. We first model the wage determination process and show that unemployment, the labour share, and the wage differential are all functions of labour market institutions. Next...

The recent debate on trends in inequality in industrial countries has been marred by the lack of consensus about the relevant concept of inequality. Labour economists are concerned with inequality in earnings, macroeconomists with movements in the wage share, while policy-makers tend to focus on...

We examine the determinants of differences across countries and over time in the distribution of personal incomes in the OECD. The Gini coefficient of personal incomes can be expressed as a function of the wage differential, the labour share, and the unemployment rate, hence labour market...

Despite a growing literature on population aging, empirical studies exploring mechanisms between aging and income inequality are scarce. This paper estimates the impact of aging on inequality via the perspective of labor income share, based on cross-country information covering the period...

Over the past two decades, aggregate labour productivity growth in most OECD countries has decoupled from real median compensation growth, implying that raising productivity is no longer sufficient to raise real wages for the typical worker. This paper provides a quantitative description of...

Existing studies on the downward trend in the labor share of income mostly focus on changeswithin individual countries. I document, however, that half of the global decline in the laborshare of income can be traced to the relocation of activities between countries. I develop atwo-country model...

This paper studies the decline of the labour share in Mexico during the period 1990-2015. It calculates the wage share and alternative measures of the labour income share (which includes labour income of the self-employed) for the whole economy, the private business sector, and its major...

We study the effect of the upsurge of natural resources income from the commodity price boom of the 2000s on the functional distribution of income. To do so, we build a general equilibrium model of Dutch disease that characterizes how natural resource windfalls affect equilibrium factor shares....

The equalization of profit rates across a multisector production economy subject to Nash bargaining over wages supports an industry wage structure like those that account for a large fraction of actual wage dispersion and a wage-wage- . . . -wage-profit surface on which the general profit rate...