We document a 5 percentage point decline in the share of global corporate income paid to labor from the mid-1970s to the late 2000s. Increased dividend payments did not absorb all of the resulting increase in profits, and therefore, the supply of corporate savings increased by over 20 percentage...

Comparing U.S. GDP to the sum of measured payments to labor and imputed rental payments to capital results in a large and volatile residual or “factorless income.” We analyze three common strategies of allocating and interpreting factorless income, specifically that it arises from economic...

The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease...

The labor share is typically measured as compensation to labor relative to gross value added ("gross labor share"), in part because gross value added is more directly measured than net value added. Labor compensation relative to net value added ("net labor share") may be more important in some...