Policy and Social Implications of Declining Labor Shares

作为劳动报酬的总收入份额或劳动份额的稳定性，一直是宏观经济模型的一个基本特征。这一假设对宏观经济动态、增长和收入不平等具有广泛的重要影响。然而，最近，美国和世界上大多数国家的劳动力份额在过去30年里出现了显著下降。过去几年，劳动力比例下降一直是最重要的政策话题之一，吸引了要求政府改变政策的呼声。该项目旨在开发工具，以更好地了解劳动力份额下降的原因和影响。实际上，该研究项目旨在创建新的国有行业和固定的劳动力份额数据集，这些数据集将提供丰富的变异，有助于确定劳动力份额下降的原因。事实证明，在投资品相对价格降幅最大的国家和行业，劳动力份额降幅最大。这表明在资本和劳动力高度可替代的环境下，资本生产部门的这种技术进步趋势的重要性。这些额外的新数据将有助于证实资本成本下降在多大程度上导致美国劳动力份额的下降，并将这一解释与其他解释区分开来，例如垄断力量或行业构成的变化或国际贸易的影响。区分这些替代方案将直接告知应对劳动力份额下降的政策类型(如果有的话)。从理论上讲，这项研究项目建立了一个框架，允许人们思考劳动力份额下降对收入不平等的影响。该研究团队正在开发一个模型，该模型将具有资本-技能互补的CES生产结构纳入具有不同主体的不完全市场模型，使人们能够理解跨要素份额的收入分配和跨家庭的收入分配的联合动态。虽然近几十年来，各国普遍经历了劳动力份额的下降和收入不平等的加剧，但在一个具有内生储蓄决定、内生劳动力供应、资本技能互补和生命周期动态等现实特征的环境中，这些趋势之间的关系可能相当复杂。

The stability of the share of total income paid out as compensation to labor, or the labor share, has been a fundamental feature of macroeconomic models. This assumption carries with it a broad range of important implications for macroeconomic dynamics, growth, and income inequality. Recently, however, a significant decline has been documented in the labor share over the past 30 years in the United States and in most countries in the world. The declining labor share has been among the most important policy topics over the past several years, attracting calls for changes in government policies. The project aims to develop tools to better understand the causes and implications of the labor share decline.Empirically, this research project aims to create novel state-industry and firm datasets of labor shares that would offer rich variation useful for identifying the cause of the labor share decline. It has been demonstrated that labor share declines were greatest in countries and industries experiencing the largest declines in the relative price of investment goods. This suggests the importance for this trend of technological progress in capital producing sectors in an environment with highly substitutable capital and labor.These additional new datasets will help corroborate the extent to which cost of capital declines caused the decline of the U.S. labor share and to differentiate between this and alternative explanations, such as changes in monopoly power or industry composition or the influence of international trade. Differentiating among these alternatives will directly inform what types of policies, if any, may be warranted in response to the declining labor share.Theoretically, this research project builds a framework that allows one to think about the repercussions of the labor share decline for income inequality. This research team is developing a model that incorporates a CES production structure with capital-skill complementarity into an incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents, allowing one to understand the joint dynamics of the distribution of income across factor shares and the distribution of income across households. While various countries have generally witnessed declining labor shares and increasing income inequality during recent decades, the relationship between these trends can be quite complicated in an environment with realistic features such as endogenous savings decisions, endogenous labor supply, capital-skill complementarity, and life-cycle dynamics.