Revisiting the global decline of the (non-housing) labor share

German Gutierrez () and Sophie Piton

No 811, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: We show that cross-country comparisons of corporate labor shares are affected by differences in the delineation of corporate sectors. While the US excludes all self-employed and most dwellings from the corporate sector, other countries include large amounts of both — biasing labor shares downwards. We propose two methods to control for these differences and obtain ‘harmonized’ non-housing labor share series. Contrary to common wisdom, the harmonized series remain stable across all major economies except the US, where the labor share still declines, primarily due to manufacturing. These new facts cast doubts on most technological explanations for the labor share decline.

Keywords: Labor share; residential real estate; self-employment; national accounts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 E25 L85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2019-07-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/ ... sing-labor-share.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-housing) Labor Share (2020)
Working Paper: Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-Housing) Labor Share (2019)
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:boe:boeewp:0811

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of England working papers from Bank of England Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Media Team ().