Dividing the Pie

Michael Siegenthaler and Tobias Stucki

ILR Review, 2015, vol. 68, issue 5, 1157-1194

Abstract: The authors are the first to study the factors determining labor’s share of income on the level of the individual firm, employing an unusually informative panel data set. The empirical examination is concerned with Switzerland, which stands out as one of the very few developed countries with a stable labor share. Broadly confirming results from previous cross-country and industry-level studies, the authors find that the main factor decreasing the labor share between 2001 and 2010 was the increase in the firm’s share of workers using information and communication technology. The main reasons why Switzerland’s labor share remained almost constant are the counteracting effects of a relatively slow rate of technological progress in 1980 to 1995 and sectoral reallocation toward industries with above-average labor shares.

Keywords: Labor share; factor income distribution; firm-level analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ilr.sagepub.com/content/68/5/1157.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:68:y:2015:i:5:p:1157-1194

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().