Existing studies on the downward trend in the labor share of income mostly focus on changeswithin individual countries. I document, however, that half of the global decline in the laborshare of income can be traced to the relocation of activities between countries. I develop atwo-country model...

The labor share has been declining in the United States, and especially so in manufacturing. This paper investigates the role of capital accumulation and market power in explaining this decline. I first estimate the production function of 21 manufacturing sectors along time series and including...

This paper uses panel cointegration and error correction models to unveil the direction of long-run causality between the real product wage and labor productivity at the industry level. I use two datasets of manufacturing industries: the EU-Klems dataset covering 11 industries in 19 developed...

As the pace of digitalization and automation accelerates globally, and more disruptive innovations in machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics are expected, new data sources and measurement tools are needed to complement existing valuable statistics and administrative data. This is...

The elasticity of substitution between capital and labor (σ) is usually considered a "deep parameter". This paper shows, in contrast, that σ is affected by both globalization and technology, and that different intensities in these drivers have different consequences for the OECD and the...

To what extent can technological advances in the production of capital account for the recent, worldwide decline in the labor income share? We pose two challenges to the automation narrative: first, estimates of the elasticity of substitution (EOS) between capital and labor tend to fall below or...

This paper provides evidence that shifts in the occupational composition of the U.S. workforce are the most important factor explaining the trend decline in the labor share over the past four decades. Estimates suggest that while there is unitary elasticity between equipment capital and...

The labor income share has been decreasing across countries since the early 1980s, sparking a growing literature about the causes of this trend (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2014; Piketty and Zucman, 2014; among many others). At the same time, there has been a steady increase in asset prices. We build a...

This paper considers a two sectors heterogeneous firms model where firms' specific production technology and capital intensity are endogenously determined through business dynamics. It shows that a shock to the relative price of investment goods is followed by the entrance of new firms...

We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999-2011. Our main contribution is to highlight the indirect effect of...