Revenue per Worker Is Up. Are Firms Getting a Larger Share?

Jeremy Pearce

No 20261015, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: From the Great Recession until 2019, U.S. labor productivity growth disappointed. Nonfarm-business output per hour grew about 1 percent a year from 2010 to 2019, down from 3 percent in the late 1990s. This slowdown was especially pronounced in manufacturing, and it coincided with a slowdown in the growth of revenue per worker among public firms. However, since 2019, growth has picked up to twice the 2010s rate, around 2 percent. In this post, I use data from firms’ 10-K filings to unpack this recent acceleration. I first show that the acceleration appears in public firms’ revenue per worker, then document how the gains went into profit margins, and finally, what firm characteristics predicted significant profit margin increases. The increase in profit margins is consistent with ongoing declines in the labor share of output.

Keywords: productivity; markups; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sbm
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DOI: 10.59576/lse.20261015

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