 Capitalism and labor shares: A cross-country panel studyAndrew Young () and Robert A. Lawson European Journal of Political Economy, 2014, vol. 33, issue C, 20-36 Abstract: We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel of up to 93 countries covering 1970 through 2009. We find that a standard deviation increase in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score is associated with about a 1/3 standard deviation increase in a country's labor share. Starting from the sample mean labor share in our panel, this amounts to about 4.26percentage points. This relationship is robust to considering OECD and non-OECD samples separately. It is also (both qualitatively and quantitatively) robust to controlling for differences in human capital levels, labor productivity, trade union density, and international economic flows. Breaking the EFW into its individual component areas, the regulation of credit, business and labor appears to be the most important source of the positive EFW–labor share relationship. Keywords: Labor share; Economic freedom; Political economy; Capitalism; Institutions; Distribution of income (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:33:y:2014:i:c:p:20-36 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2013.11.006 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier |
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