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Increasing Capital Shares: Causes and Consequences

Paper Session

Friday, Jan. 5, 2018 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM

Pennsylvania Convention Center, 104-B
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, University of Pennsylvania

Declining Labor and Capital Shares

Simcha Barkai
,
London Business School

Abstract

This paper shows that the decline in the labor share over the past 30 years was not offset by an increase in the capital share. Capital costs are the product of the required rate of return on capital and the value of the capital stock, and the capital share is the ratio of capital costs to gross value added. The capital share is declining, driven by a large decline in the cost of capital. Measured in percentage terms, the decline in the capital share (30%) is much more dramatic than the decline in the labor share (10%). The profit share has increased by more than 12 percentage points. The value of this increase in profits amounts to over $1.1 trillion in 2014, or $14 thousand per employee. The decline in the capital share is unlikely to be driven by unobserved capital. In a standard model, a decline in competition is necessary to generate simultaneous declines in the labor and capital shares. A calibrated model shows that a decline in competition quantitatively matches the data. This paper provides reduced form empirical evidence that a decline in competition plays a significant role in the decline in the labor share. Increases in industry concentration are associated with declines in the labor share. These results suggest that the decline in the shares of labor and capital are due to a decline in competition and call into question the conclusion that the decline in the labor share is an efficient outcome.

Labor Share and Technology Dynamics

Sekyu Choi
,
University of Bristol
José-Víctor Ríos-Rull
,
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In this paper we study the business cycle properties of the U.S. labor share, with special emphasis on its overshooting property: After a positive shock to output, the labor share falls temporarily but it quickly rises, staying persistently above average for around thirty quarters. We propose an extension to standard models with labor search frictions where we use putty clay technology and an aggregate technological shock biased towards new investment. Using the model, we study how the discipline imposed by the movements in labor share at business cycle frequency affects predictions of standard models in terms of labor market variables. Our baseline is able to match the overshooting of the labor share and produces significant volatility of hours and unemployment. Thus, we show a novel way in which to overcome the low amplification problem in macroeconomic models (the so called Shimer puzzle), with the added property of being consistent with external empirical evidence.

The Demise of the Treaty of Detroit and (Dis)inflation Dynamics

Isabel Cairo
,
Federal Reserve Board
Jae Sim
,
Federal Reserve Board

Abstract

A canonical New Keynesian Phillips curve predicts that the current inflation rate is the present value of future unit labor cost, a.k.a. labor income share. According to this framework, disinflation in 1980s and 1990s was possible only if labor income share was expected to fall. In other words, to achieve disinflation, real wage growth must fall behind productivity growth. Hence, the cost of disinflation falls disproportionately on workers. Macroeconomists have not considered the distributional consequences of disinflation. This is partly because most workhorse models analyze the macroeconomic consequences of disinflation from the perspective of a representative agent. What happens if the workers are not the owners of the firms? Disinflation necessarily redistributes national income from workers to the owners of the firms. In this paper, we assume that the labor income share has fallen owing to the decline of workers' bargaining power. We show that disinflation policy is the most effective and the most regressive when the central bank gives up the dual mandate effectively or fails to revise down the natural rate of unemployment in a timely manner.

Political Redistribution Risk and Aggregate Fluctuations

Thorsten Drautzburg
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde
,
University of Pennsylvania
Pablo Guerron
,
Boston College

Abstract

We argue that political distribution risk is an important driver of aggregate fluctuations. To that end, we document significant changes in the capital share after large political events, such as the end of dictatorships, political realignments, or modifications in collective bargaining rules in a sample of developed and emerging economies. These policy changes are often associated with significant fluctuations in output and asset prices. We also show, using a Bayesian Proxy-VAR estimated with U.S. data, how distribution shocks cause movements in output, unemployment, and asset pricing. To quantify the importance of these political shocks for the U.S., we extend an otherwise standard neoclassical growth model. We model political shocks as exogenous changes in the bargaining power of workers in a labor market with search and matching. We calibrate the model to the U.S. corporate non-financial business sector. A one-standard deviation redistribution shock reduces the capital share 0.2% on impact and leads to a drop in output of 0.6%. Also, political distribution risk accounts for 30 to 40% of output volatility and 15 to 25% of the observed volatility of U.S. gross capital shares, depending on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. Eliminating political redistribution risk in the U.S. would raise the welfare of the representative household by 1.6% of steady-state consumption.
JEL Classifications
  • E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy
  • J5 - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining