In this second part of our study we survey the rapidly expanding empirical literature on the determinants of the functional distribution of income. Three major strands emerge: technological change, international trade, and financialization. All contribute to the fluctuations of the labor share,...

Economic theory frequently assumes constant factor shares and often treats the topic as secondary. We will show that this is a mistake by deriving the first high-frequency measure of the US labor share for the whole economy. We find that the labor share has held remarkably steady indeed, but...

Recent research stresses the macroeconomic dimension of income distribution, but no theory has yet emerged. In this note, we introduce factor shares into popular growth models to gain insights into the macroeconomic effects of income distribution. The cost of modifying existing models is low...

Money, Distribution and Economic Policy takes issue with the inappropriate treatment of money, effective demand and distribution issues in modern mainstream macroeconomics. It presents contributions which are critical of modern orthodoxy and which explore alternative approaches to macroeconomics...

This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances as well as an ordinal representation of such inequality based on the use of so-called social immobility curves. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents (e.g.,...

Club de Madrid, Shared Societies are societies in which people hold an equal capacity to participate in, and benefit from, economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, language, gender, or other attributes and where, as a consequence, relationships...

Do all types of demand have the same effect on output? To answer this question, I estimate a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model of consumption, investment, and government spending on US data, 1955-2007. I find that: (1) economic growth can be decomposed into a short-run (transitory)...

This paper presents a review of the literature on the economics of shared societies. As defined by the Club de Madrid, shared societies are societies in which people hold an equal capacity to participate in and benefit from economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race,...

In this second part of our study we survey the rapidly expanding empirical literature on the determinants of the functional distribution of income. Three major strands emerge: technological change, international trade, and financialization. All contribute to the fluctuations of the labor share,...