It is often claimed that the current basis upon which the French social security contributions are calculated, namely the wage bill, penalises employment, by increasing labor costs and consequently encouraging firms to substitute capital for labor. Broadening this basis by incorporating some...

The U.S. labor share of income has been on a secular downward trajectory since thebeginning of the new millennium. Using data that are disaggregated across both state andindustry, we show the decline in the labor share is broad-based but the extent of the fallvaries greatly. Exploiting a new...

This paper presents a connecting methodology in order to trace the emerging dynamics of inequality for the youth populace of Europe. We determine that the development of these dynamics are directly affected by the advancement of technology, and especially related to Information and Communication...

There are two fundamental reasons why factor shares have traditionally been overlooked in the economic literature. First, because of their nature, factor shares are conceptually difficult to define and measure. Second, they have for a long time been perceived as constant across time and space....

We discuss regional disparities in economic performance and living standards. We first set out some key facts, and provide a conceptual framework to help analyze whether such disparities are efficient, or instead reflect market and/or policy failures. We examine whether policy attempts to reduce...

We reinterpret unit labor costs (ULC) as the product of the labor share in value added, times a price adjustment factor. This allows us to discuss the functional distribution of income. We use data from India's organized manufacturing sector and show that while India's ULC displays a clear...

This paper assesses empirically the hypotheses by Bental and Demougin (2010) that innovations in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) reduce the labor share in OECD countries by improving the monitoring technology. In a first step, I show that data trends for the labor share, wages in...

Recent evidence on functional income distribution suggests that the shares of capital and labour in national income vary considerably both over time and across countries. Specifically, there seems to be a general reduction in the labour share around the world, in particular from the mid-1980s...

Through panel estimates using OECD country-industry statistics, this paper aims to clarify the determinants of rent creation and the mechanisms of rent sharing, and the role of market regulations in these processes. The empirical analysis is carried out in two steps. The first explains the rent...

Workhorse search and matching models assume constant bargaining weights, while recent evidence indicates that weights vary across time and in cross section. We endogenize bargaining weights in a life-cycle search and matching model by replacing a standard Cobb-Douglas (CD) matching function with...