The Distributional Effects of Labour Market Deregulation : Wage Share and Fixed-Term Contracts

Since the 1980s, most of the advanced economies have massively ‘flexibilized’ their labour markets by reducing protection against layoffs or introducing temporary and flexible contractual forms. Meanwhile, a stylized fact of economic theory has come undone, namely the stability of the wage share of income. Indeed, despite some criticism of possible measurement errors, there is a substantial consensus on the decreasing trends in the labour share. In this contribution, we empirically evaluate whether the two phenomena are causally linked, by investigating the impact of changes in the regulation of fixed-term contracts on functional distribution. Using Jorda’s local projection method in a panel of 18 advanced countries in the period 1985-2019, we find that reforms that deregulate fixed-term contracts consistently reduce the wage share