We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel of up to 93 countries covering 1970 through 2009. We find that a standard deviation increase in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score is associated with about...

The relative stability of aggregate labor share constitutes one of the great macroeconomic ratios. However, relative stability at the aggregate level masks the unbalanced nature of sectoral labor shares. We present a two-sector (manufacturing and services) model with induced innovation that can...

Measuring labor's share of an economy's aggregate income seems straightforward, at least in principle. Count up wage and salary income, along with the value of benefits provided to employees, and divide it by total income. However, one fundamental concept of labor's share in macroeconomic theory...

Alan Krueger (1999) provides a measure of "raw" labor's share for the US postwar economy based on Mincerian regressions using Census data on individual earnings, schooling, and work experience. He finds that raw labor's share fell by over 8 percent from 1959 through 1996 to under 5 percent of...