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Journal Article
Top Income Inequality in the 21st Century: Some Cautionary Notes
Guvenen, Fatih; Kaplan, Greg (2017-10)
We revisit recent empirical evidence about the rise in top income inequality in the United States, drawing attention to key issues that we believe are critical for an informed discussion about changing inequality since 1980: the definition of income (labor versus total), the unit of analysis (individual versus tax unit), the importance of partnership and S-corporation income, income shifting between the corporate and personal sectors in response to tax incentives, the definition of the top of the distribution, and trends in the middle and bottom of the distribution. Our goal is to inform ...
Quarterly Review , Issue October , Pages 2-15

Working Paper
Earnings Inequality and the Minimum Wage: Evidence from Brazil
Engbom, Niklas; Moser, Christian (2018-03-12)
We show that an increase in the minimum wage can have large effects throughout the earnings distribution, using a combination of theory and evidence. To this end, we develop an equilibrium search model featuring empirically relevant worker and firm heterogeneity. The minimum wage induces firms to adjust their equilibrium wage and vacancy policies, leading to spillovers on higher wages. We use the estimated model to evaluate the effects of a 119 percent increase in the real minimum wage in Brazil from 1996 to 2012. The policy change explains a large decline in earnings inequality, with ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 7

Working Paper
Consumption, Wealth, and Income Inequality: A Tale of Tails
Gaillard, Alexandre; Hellwig, Christian; Wangner, Philipp; Werquin, Nicolas (2023-12-05)
We provide evidence that the distributions of consumption, labor income, wealth, and capital income exhibit asymptotic power-law behavior with a strict ranking of upper tail inequality, in that order, from the least to the most unequal. We show analytically and quantitatively that the canonical heterogeneous-agent model cannot replicate the proper ranking and magnitudes of these four tails simultaneously. Mechanisms addressing the wealth concentration puzzle in these models through return heterogeneity lead to a mirror consumption concentration puzzle. We match the cross-sectional data on ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2023-43

Working Paper
Credit and the Labor Share: Evidence from U.S. States
Weinberger, Ariel; Leblebicioglu, Asli (2017-08-01)
We analyze the role of credit markets in explaining the changes in the U.S. labor share by evaluating the effects of state-level banking deregulation, which resulted in improved access to cheaper credit. Utilizing a difference-in-differences strategy, we provide causal evidence showing labor share declined following the interstate banking deregulation. We show that the lower cost of credit, increase in the availability of credit, and greater bank competition in each state are mechanisms that led to the decline in the labor share. We use this evidence to obtain the elasticity of labor share ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 326

Working Paper
Corporate Tax Cuts and the Decline of the Manufacturing Labor Share
Kaymak, Barış; Schott, Immo (2023-08-30)
We document a strong empirical connection between corporate taxation and the manufacturing labor share, both in the US and across OECD countries. Our estimates associate 30 percent to 60 percent of the observed decline in labor shares with the fall in corporate taxation. Using an equilibrium model of an industry where firms differ in their capital intensities, we show that lower corporate tax rates reduce the labor share by raising the market share of capital-intensive firms. The tax elasticity of the labor share depends on the joint distribution of labor intensities and value added at the ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1379

Working Paper
The Global Rise of Corporate Saving
Karabarbounis, Loukas; Chen, Peter; Neiman, Brent (2017-01-24)
The sectoral composition of global saving changed dramatically during the last three decades. Whereas in the early 1980s most of global investment was funded by household saving, nowadays nearly two-thirds of global investment is funded by corporate saving. This shift in the sectoral composition of saving was not accompanied by changes in the sectoral composition of investment, implying an improvement in the corporate net lending position. We characterize the behavior of corporate saving using both national income accounts and firm-level data and clarify its relationship with the global ...
Working Papers , Paper 736

Newsletter
Shareholder Power and Workers’ Labor Market Outcomes
Kim, Hyunseob (2025-03)
Public corporations account for about half of private employment in the United States.1 These large corporations have undergone radical changes in their ownership structure over the past several decades.2 Figure 1 illustrates the changes—total block institutional ownership, defined as the total share of equity owned by all institutional investors that own at least 5% of the shares for public firms, on average increased fourfold from 1980 to 2023. As a result, the block institutional shareholders, on average, held over 20% of the equity shares of U.S. public corporations by the end of the ...
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 505 , Pages 6

Working Paper
Does Redistribution Increase Output? The Centrality of Labor Supply
Schwartzman, Felipe; Owens, Andrew; Athreya, Kartik B. (2014-02-28)
The aftermath of the recent recession has seen numerous calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate activity. We show that the key to understanding the direction and size of such interventions lies in labor supply decisions. We study the aggregate impact of short-term redistributive economic policy in a standard incomplete-markets model. We characterize analytically conditions under which redistribution leads to an increase or decrease in effective hours worked, and hence, output. We then show that under the parameterization that matches the wealth distribution ...
Working Paper , Paper 14-4

Working Paper
Understanding Growth Through Automation: The Neoclassical Perspective
Tavares, Marina; Drozd, Lukasz A.; Taschereau-Dumouchel, Mathieu (2022-08-26)
We study how advancements in automation technology affect the division of aggregate income between capital and labor in the context of long-run growth. Our analysis focuses on the fundamental trade-off between the labor-displacing effect of automation and its positive productivity effect in an elementary task-based framework featuring a schedule of automation prices across tasks linked to the state of technology. We obtain general conditions for the automation technology and technical change driving automation to be labor-share displacing. We identify a unique task technology that reconciles ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-25

Working Paper
The Future of Labor: Automation and the Labor Share in the Second Machine Age
Giri, Rahul; Taschereau-Dumouchel, Mathieu; Xia, Junjie; Drozd, Lukasz A.; Cheng, Hong (2021-03-09)
We study the effect of modern automation on firm-level labor shares using a 2018 survey of 1,618 manufacturing firms in China. We exploit geographic and industry variation built into the design of subsidies for automation paid under a vast government industrialization program, “Made In China 2025,” to construct an instrument for automation investment. We use a canonical CES framework of automation and develop a novel methodology to structurally estimate the elasticity of substitution between labor and automation capital among automating firms, which for our preferred specification is 3.8. ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-11

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