Home Business & Economics Explaining Movements in the Labor Share
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Explaining Movements in the Labor Share

  • Samuel Bentolila and Gilles Saint-Paul
Published/Copyright: October 3, 2003
Contributions in Macroeconomics
From the journal Contributions in Macroeconomics Volume 3 Issue 1

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.

Keywords: Labor share; capital-output ratio
Published Online: 2003-10-3

©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topics Article
  2. Balance of Payments Constrained Non-Scale Growth and the Population Puzzle
  3. The Human Capital Constraint: Of Increasing Returns, Education Choice and Coordination Failure
  4. ``To Furnish an Elastic Currency'': Banking, Aggregate Risk, and Welfare
  5. How Prudent are Community Representative Consumers?
  6. Price Distribution in a Symmetric Economy
  7. The Role of Stock Markets in Current Account Dynamics: a Time Series Approach
  8. Shiftwork, Adjustment Costs and Uncertainty
  9. How Do Future Constraints Affect Current Investment?
  10. The Politics of Endogenous Growth
  11. Sticky Prices, Coordination and Enforcement
  12. Fractional Integration with Bloomfield Disturbances in the Specification of Real Output in the G7 Countries
  13. Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero
  14. High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?
  15. Substitution Elasticities and Investment Dynamics in Two-Country Business Cycle Models
  16. Contributions Article
  17. On Modeling the Effects of Inflation Shocks: Comments and Some Further Evidence
  18. Optimal Monetary Policy and the Correlation between Prices and Output
  19. Are Banking Supervisory Data Useful for Macroeconomic Forecasts?
  20. An Analytical Approach to the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles and the Benefit from Activist Monetary Policy
  21. Interpreting the Significance of the Lagged Interest Rate in Estimated Monetary Policy Rules
  22. Idle Capital and Long-Run Productivity
  23. The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement
  24. Parente and Prescott's Theory May Work in Practice But Does Not Work in Theory
  25. Explaining Movements in the Labor Share
  26. Endogenous Growth with Intertemporally Dependent Preferences
  27. On the Friedman Rule in Search Models with Divisible Money
  28. Finance Causes Growth: Can We Be So Sure?
  29. Advances Article
  30. Where Is the Natural Rate? Rational Policy Mistakes and Persistent Deviations of Inflation from Target
  31. Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Evidence from the Employment Cost Index
https://doi.org/10.2202/1534-6005.1103
Keywords for this article
Labor share; capital-output ratio

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Topics Article
  2. Balance of Payments Constrained Non-Scale Growth and the Population Puzzle
  3. The Human Capital Constraint: Of Increasing Returns, Education Choice and Coordination Failure
  4. ``To Furnish an Elastic Currency'': Banking, Aggregate Risk, and Welfare
  5. How Prudent are Community Representative Consumers?
  6. Price Distribution in a Symmetric Economy
  7. The Role of Stock Markets in Current Account Dynamics: a Time Series Approach
  8. Shiftwork, Adjustment Costs and Uncertainty
  9. How Do Future Constraints Affect Current Investment?
  10. The Politics of Endogenous Growth
  11. Sticky Prices, Coordination and Enforcement
  12. Fractional Integration with Bloomfield Disturbances in the Specification of Real Output in the G7 Countries
  13. Monetary Policy When the Nominal Short-Term Interest Rate is Zero
  14. High-Tech Human Capital: Do the Richest Countries Invest the Most?
  15. Substitution Elasticities and Investment Dynamics in Two-Country Business Cycle Models
  16. Contributions Article
  17. On Modeling the Effects of Inflation Shocks: Comments and Some Further Evidence
  18. Optimal Monetary Policy and the Correlation between Prices and Output
  19. Are Banking Supervisory Data Useful for Macroeconomic Forecasts?
  20. An Analytical Approach to the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles and the Benefit from Activist Monetary Policy
  21. Interpreting the Significance of the Lagged Interest Rate in Estimated Monetary Policy Rules
  22. Idle Capital and Long-Run Productivity
  23. The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement
  24. Parente and Prescott's Theory May Work in Practice But Does Not Work in Theory
  25. Explaining Movements in the Labor Share
  26. Endogenous Growth with Intertemporally Dependent Preferences
  27. On the Friedman Rule in Search Models with Divisible Money
  28. Finance Causes Growth: Can We Be So Sure?
  29. Advances Article
  30. Where Is the Natural Rate? Rational Policy Mistakes and Persistent Deviations of Inflation from Target
  31. Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Evidence from the Employment Cost Index
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 31.12.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.2202/1534-6005.1103/html
Scroll to top button