Explaining Movements in the Labor Share

By S. Bentolila, G. Saint‐Paul. 2003

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we study the evolution of the labor share in the OECD. We show it is essentially related to the capital-output ratio; that this relationship is shifted by factors like the price of imported materials or capital-augmenting technological progress; and that discrepancies between the marginal product of labor and the real wage ---due to, e.g., labor adjustment costs or union wage bargaining--- cause departures from it. We also provide empirical evidence on the determinants of the labor share with panel data on 13 industries and 12 countries for 1972-93.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7332607eb07a49453f77fae2a2512f131515ab2a

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In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Understanding labour income share dynamics in Europe (2009, background): “Blanchard and Wolfers (2000) rationalize the Spanish case with reference to the development of fixedterm contracts rather than the weakening of the protection of indefinite workers.”
Labour Market Institutions and the Personal Distribution of Income in the OECD (2009, background): “Bentolila and Saint-Paul (2003), who consider sectoral data for 12 countries over a shorter time span, find a r The London School of Economics and Political Science 2009 significant correlation between the labour share (corrected for self-employment) and the capital–output ratio, strike activity,…”
The Effects of Technical Change on Labor Market Inequalities (2004, neutral): “Using (28) and (29) into this condition, one arrives at the expression for equilibrium wage inequality: w − w = r + 2p 1− 2p (30)”
Getting Income Shares Right (2009, methodology): “We use our estimates of productivity to reexamine the magnitude of the widely-documented post-1973 productivity slowdown (see Baily, 1986 and 3 See Bentolila and Saint-Paul (2003).”
The Global Decline of the Labor Share (2014, positive): “First, our findings are consistent with earlier work by Blanchard (1997), Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003), Jones (2003), and Bentolila and Saint-Paul (2003) that focuses on the variability of labor shares over the medium run, including the large declines seen during the 1980s in Western Europe.”
The Normalized CES Production Function: Theory and Empirics (2011, neutral): “One of the most important theorems about a General Mean is that it is an increasing function of its order (Hardy et al. (1934), p. 26 f.; Beckenbach and Bellman (1961), p. 16-18; see also the proof in La Grandville (2009), p. 111-113).”
The personal and the factor distributions of income in a cross-section of countries (2007, background): “Harrison (2002), Bentolila and Saint-Paul (2003) .”
Measuring factor income shares at the sectoral level (2008, background): “7 This is not the case when wages are determined through collective wage bargaining as in many European countries; see Bentolila and Saint-Paul (2003) for further discussion.”