Revenue Growth and Staff Expense: A Public-Company Follow-Up to Eclipse of Rent-Sharing

Haochuan Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Does a widening gap between company revenue and staff expense per employee provide evidence of declining rent-sharing? We examine how reporting selection and sector composition affect that inference, as a follow-up to Acemoglu, He, and le Maire's Eclipse of Rent-Sharing. We assemble 7,000 company-years for 695 firms over 2015-2025. In a fixed sample of 75 staff-expense reporters, nominal revenue per employee rises 83.6%, while staff expense per employee rises 51.0%. The pooled expense-to-revenue ratio falls, but the pattern is concentrated in financial firms; among the other 25 reporters, aggregate staff expense per employee grows slightly faster than aggregate revenue per employee. These accounting measures identify neither real productivity nor the allocation of its gains between labor and capital. A separate audit of the original paper's reported estimates finds that some US output effects remain imprecisely estimated, while several Danish estimates support tighter bounds. The fitted reporting-probability model exhibits concentrated weights, substantial two-group imbalance and sectors without reporters; it does not justify generalizing payroll results. We extend the original study's measurement discussion to public-company accounts and qualify a blanket interpretation of no output effects: precision varies across its estimates. Our sector-dependent accounting results neither confirm nor overturn its causal wage and labor-share findings.

Date: 2026-09
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