Goodwin or Kalecki in Demand? Functional Income Distribution and Aggregate Demand in the Short Run

In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory, Richard Goodwin (1967) presented a model which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast, Michal Kalecki (1971) argued that a higher wage share would have an expansionary effect because the consumption propensity out of wage income is higher than that out of profit income. Based on a general model that allows for wage-led as well as profit-led demand regimes, this paper estimates the effects of a change in the wage share on aggregate private domestic demand with quarterly data for 12 OECD countries.