Why is Labor Receiving a Smaller Share of Global Income? Theory and Empirical Evidence
By Mai Dao, M. Das, Z. Kóczán, Weicheng Lian. Social Science Research Network, 2017
201 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper documents the downward trend in the labor share of global income since the early 1990s, as well as its heterogeneous evolution across countries, industries and worker skill groups, using a newly assembled dataset, and analyzes the drivers behind it. Technological progress, along with varying exposure to routine occupations, explains about half the overall decline in advanced economies, with a larger negative impact on middle-skilled workers. In emerging markets, the labor share evolution is explained predominantly by global integration, particularly the expansion of global value chains that contributed to raising the overall capital intensity in production.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8eda8f9e6cb20de597b94291c7130f6de513c6c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- David H. Autor
- John Van Reenen
- A. Salomons
- David Dorn
- Daron Acemoglu
- Lawrence F. Katz
- Christina Patterson
- Gene M. Grossman
Citations in the corpus
- Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share (2018, unknown): “Akin to Graetz and Michaels (2015) and Dao et al. (2017), the current paper applies harmonized cross-country and cross-industry data to explore the relationship between technological change and labor market outcomes.”
- The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms* (2017, background): “Dao et al. (2017) point to a decline in the labor share between 1991 and 2014 in 29 large countries that account for about two-thirds of world GDP in 2014.”
- Is Automation Labor Share-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share (2018, methodology): “In work closely related to ours, Dao et al. (2017) analyze sources of the trend decline in labor share in a panel of 49 emerging and industrialized countries. Using cross-country and cross-sector variation in the prevalence of occupations potentially susceptible to automation (as per Autor and Dorn,”
- The Elusive Explanation for the Declining Labor Share (2021, background): “15Relatedly, Dao et al. (2017) nd stronger correlations between the relative price of capital and the labor share in countries that perform greater fractions of routine tasks.”
- The Aggregate and Distributional Effects of Financial Globalization: Evidence from Macro and Sectoral Data (2018, background): “4 The third is on the drivers of the labor share, which mostly focused on the roles of technological progress in equipment goods and implied substitution of capital for routine labor tasks (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2013; AlvarezCuadrado et al., 2015; Eden and Gaggl, 2015; Acemoglu and Restrepo, 201”