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Discussion Paper
The Post‑COVID Decline in the Labor Share
Audoly, Richard; Guerin, Miles; Narayanan, Srinidhi; Schuh, Rachel (2026-06-24)
The labor share of income in the U.S. is currently at its lowest-ever level in the post-war period. The labor share measures the fraction of economic output paid to workers as wages and salaries. As such, it is a useful benchmark for wage growth: when the labor share falls, it means that productivity, prices, or both are growing faster than wages. After much-studied drops in the 2000s, the labor share fell sharply again after the COVID pandemic. In this post, we compare the dynamics of the labor share post-COVID to earlier periods to understand whether the recent decline represents the ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20260624

Report
Replacement hiring and the productivity-wage gap
Wee, Shu Lin; Acharya, Sushant (2018-06-01)
A large and growing share of hires in the United States are replacement hires. This increase coincides with a growing productivity-wage gap. We connect these trends by building a model where firms post long-lived vacancies and engage in on-the-job search for more productive workers. These features improve a firm's bargaining position while raising workers' job insecurity and the wedge between hiring and meeting rates. All three channels lower wages while raising productivity. Quantitatively, increased replacement hiring explains half the increase in the productivity-wage gap. The socially ...
Staff Reports , Paper 860

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

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

Journal Article
Why Is the Labor Share Declining?
Shin, Yongseok; Aum, Sangmin (2020-10-22)
The fraction of national income accruing to labor (the labor share) had been roughly constant in developed economies for much of the 20th century but has fallen since the 1980s. We review several of the leading explanations in the literature for the declining labor share. We then point to hitherto unexplored dimensions of the data and provide suggestive evidence for a new explanation. In particular, we show that the labor share began a steeper descent in 2000. This more recent break in the labor-share trend coincides with the rapid rise of software investment, which has left a larger impact ...
Review , Volume 102 , Issue 4 , Pages 413-428

Working Paper
Capital-Task Complementarity and the Decline of the U.S. Labor Share of Income
Orak, Musa (2017-03)
This paper provides evidence that shifts in the occupational composition of the U.S. workforce are the most important factor explaining the trend decline in the labor share over the past four decades. Estimates suggest that while there is unitary elasticity between equipment capital and non-routine tasks, equipment capital and routine tasks are highly substitutable. Through the lenses of a general equilibrium model with occupational choice and the estimated production technology, I document that the fall in relative price of equipment capital alone can explain 72 percent of the observed ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1200

Journal Article
Superstar Firms and the Falling Labor Share
Carmody, Kody (2017-04)
Review of the following article: {{p}} "Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share." David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenen, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, May 2017, vol. 107, no. 5, pp. 180-185.
Econ Focus , Issue 2Q , Pages 9-9

Working Paper
What Can We Learn from Idiosyncratic Wage Changes?
Doniger, Cynthia L. (2021-08-12)
I document six facts about wage changes. First, most pay revisions occur at yearly frequency, but a small proportion occur at idiosyncratic times. Second, idiosyncratic pay changes are larger and more dispersed than year-end pay changes and resemble more pay changes occurring at job-to-job transitions. Third, idiosyncratic pay changes are more common for workers with less experience and, forth, in firms higher on the job-ladder. Fifth, industries in which the incidence of idiosyncratic raises have risen have experienced greater declines in labor share. Sixth, industries in which more firms ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-055

Working Paper
Endogenous Bargaining Power and Declining Labor Compensation Share
Córdoba, Juan C.; Isojärvi, Anni T.; Li, Haoran (2024-05-29)
We document that the protracted decline in the labor share has been accompanied by a decline in the tightness rate defined as the number of vacancies per job seekers. We argue that these two trends are related. When vacancies and job seekers are complements in the matching process, a decline in the tightness rate reduces workers’ fundamental bargaining power as defined by Hosios (1990), which in turn reduces the labor share of income. We calibrate a search and matching model extended to allow for an endogenous determination of bargaining power. The model can rationalize the common trends in ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 092

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