Privatization, Entry Regulation and the Decline of Labor's Share of GDP: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Network Industries
Ghazala Azmat,
Alan Manning and
John van Reenen
CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Abstract:
Labor's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network industries (e.g. telecommunications and utilities). We present a model with agency problems, imperfect product market competition and worker bargaining which makes clear predictions on how the labor share, employment and wages respond to privatization and other regulatory changes. We exploit cross-country panel data on several network industries and find that privatization can account for a significant proportion of the fall of labor's share (a fifth overall, but over half in Britain and France). The impact of privatization has been offset by falling barriers to entry, which consistent with theory, dampens profit margins.
Keywords: Profit share; Wages; Privatization; Entry Regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 E24 E25 J30 L32 L33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-mac and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0806.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Privatization, Entry Regulation and the Decline of Labour's Share of GDP: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Network Industries (2007) 
Working Paper: Privatization, entry regulation and the decline of labor's share of GDP: a cross-country analysis of the network industries (2007) 
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:cep:cepdps:dp0806
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().