Increasing and Decreasing Labor Shares: Cross-Country Differences in the XXI Century

Sangmin Aum, Dongya Koh and Raül Santaeulà lia-Llopis

No 1135, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We describe the behavior of the labor share in the corporate sector for twenty OECD countries over the first 15 years of the XXI century. Our first finding is that the OECD labor share -a cross-country average- is trendless over this medium-run horizon after adjusting for the labor income generated from IPP rents as in Koh et al. (2017). Second, we find that the behavior of the labor share is largely heterogeneous across countries over this period. Indeed, the corporate labor share significantly increases for equally as many countries (e.g., France, Italy and the United Kingdom) as it decreases (e.g., Germany, Israel and the United States) over this period. Third, a decomposition of the corporate labor share behavior into that of its components shows that the cross-country differences in labor share trends are mainly driven by the differences in labor productivity growth and not wages.

Keywords: wages; Labor Productivity; labor share; intellectual property products; SNA revisions; cross-country (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E22 E25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-his, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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