Income Shares, Secular Stagnation and the Long‐Run Distribution of Wealth
Income Shares, Secular Stagnation and the Long‐Run Distribution of Wealth
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收入份额、长期停滞和财富的长期分配
DOI：
10.1111/meca.12277
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Daniele Tavani
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Luke Petach;Daniele Tavani
美国近期经济史有四个令人震惊的典型事实：（i）劳动生产率下降； (ii) 劳动份额下降，(iii) 资本收入比率上升，以及 (iv) 最高收入者所拥有的财富份额增加。在本文中，我们对这些事实提供了一种非新古典主义的解释，它将帕西内蒂（Pasinetti，1962）关于阶级间储蓄倾向差异的方法与肯尼迪（Kennedy，1964）的诱发技术变革（ITC）理论相结合。首先，我们基于经验支持的论点，为工人的储蓄倾向低于资本家提供了一个简单的微观经济原理，即消费同侪效应在收入分配的较低阶层更为普遍（Petach 和 Tavani，2018）。然后，我们表明，降低劳动份额的制度变迁——工会化的下降、劳动力市场垄断势力的增强、过度竞争的全球环境引发的所谓“逐底竞争”，或者戈登（2015）所说的开创性科学发现的枯竭——可以解释劳动生产率增长下降的原因，因为创新以节省劳动力成本的动力减弱。与 ITC 相结合，差别储蓄提供了资本主义财富份额与资本收入比率之间的直接关系，而与资本和劳动力之间的替代弹性无关。最后，我们认为这些趋势并非不可避免：税收政策可以用来实现任何财富分配，类似于 Zamparelli（2016）；而压垮工人的制度安排可以通过抵消政策变化来扭转。然而，考虑到当前的制度和全球气候，这两项政策变化似乎都不太可能。
Four alarming stylized facts have characterized the recent economic history of the United States: (i) a fall in labor productivity; (ii) a fall in the labor share, (iii) an increase in the capital income ratio, and (iv) an increase in the wealth share owned by top income earners. In this paper, we offer a non-Neoclassical explanation for these facts that merges the Pasinetti (1962) approach to differential saving propensities among classes with the theory of induced technical change (ITC) by Kennedy (1964). First, we provide a simple microeconomic rationale for workers' saving propensity being lower than capitalists' based on the empirically-supported argument that consumption peer effects are more prevalent at lower brackets of the income distribution (Petach and Tavani, 2018). We then show that institutional changes that lower the labor share - a decline in unionization, an increase in monopsony power in the labor market, the so-called 'race to the bottom' fostered by a hyper-competitive global environment, or the exhaustion of path-breaking scientific discoveries as argued by Gordon (2015) - can explain the decline in labor productivity growth because of the reduced incentives to innovate to save on labor costs. Combined with ITC, differential savings delivers a direct relationship between the capitalist share of wealth and the capital-income ratio independent of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. Finally, we argue that these tendencies are not inevitable: tax policy can be used to implement any wealth distribution, similarly to Zamparelli (2016); while worker-crushing institutional arrangements can be reversed through counteracting policy changes. However, both policy changes appear unlikely given the current institutional and global climate.