A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Karabarbounis, Loukas; Neiman, Brent Article Trends in factor shares: Facts and implications NBER Reporter Provided in Cooperation with: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, Mass. Suggested Citation: Karabarbounis, Loukas; Neiman, Brent (2017) : Trends in factor shares: Facts and implications, NBER Reporter, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Cambridge, MA, Iss. 4, pp. 19-22 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/178760 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Adolescent Behavior,” Economic Inquiry, Trends in Factor Shares: Facts and Implications explain their generally better outcomes. Salvanes, “The More the Merrier? 44(2), 2006, pp. 215–33. The Effect of Family Composition on Return to Text Conclusion Children’s Education” NBER Working 9 F. Cunha and J. Heckman, “The Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman Paper No. 10720, September 2004, Technology of Skill Formation,” NBER In the past two decades, with the and Quarterly Journal of Economics, Working Paper No. 12840, January increased accessibility of administrative 120(2), 2005, pp. 669–700. 2007. datasets on large swaths of the popula- Return to Text Return to Text The distribution of national income The Global Decline tion, economists and other researchers 3 S. Black, P. Devereux, and K. 10 R. Zajonc and G. Markus, “Birth between capital and labor and the determi- of the Labor Share have been better able to identify the role Salvanes, “Older and Wiser? Birth Order and Intellectual Development,” nants of that split are important for many of birth order in the outcomes of children. Order and the IQ of Young Men,” NBER Psychological Review, 82(1), 1975, reasons. The evolution of factor shares over Our work builds on a dataset that we There is strong evidence of substantial dif- Working Paper No. 13237, July 2007, pp. 74–88; R. Zajonc, “Family time affects income inequality across house- collected from national income and product ferences by birth order across a range of and CESifo Economic Studies, Oxford Configuration and Intelligence,” Science, holds. Changes in factor shares inform econ- accounts for many countries and industries. outcomes. While I have described several University Press, vol. 57(1), pages 103– 192(4236), 1976, pp. 227–36; J. omists’ assumptions about aggregate produc- We demonstrate that, at the global level, of my own papers on the topic, a number 20, March 2011. Price, “Parent-Child Q uality Time: Loukas Karabarbounis is an tion technologies and their understanding the labor share has been declining since the of other researchers have also taken advan- Return to Text Does Birth Order Matter?” in Journal associate professor of economics of the state of product and labor markets. early 1980s.3 The decline has been broad- tage of newly available datasets in Florida 4 J. Rodgers, H. Cleveland, E. van of Human Resources, 43(1), 2008, at the University of Minnesota. The behavior of factor shares influences con- based. As shown in Figure 1, it occurred in and Denmark to examine the role of birth den Oord, and D. Rowe, “Resolving pp. 240–65; J.Lehmann, A. Nuevo- He is also a research consultant clusions about the implications of progress seven of the eight largest economies of the order on other important outcomes, specif- the Debate Over Birth Order, Family Chiquero, and M. Vidal-Fernandez, at the Federal Reserve Bank of in computing, robotics, and information world. It occurred in all Scandinavian coun- ically juvenile delinquency and later crimi- Size, and Intelligence,” American “The Early Origins of Birth Order Minneapolis and a research asso- technologies, the response and incidence of tries, where labor unions have traditionally nal behavior.13 Consistent with the work Psychologist, 55(6), 2000, pp. 599– Differences in Children’s Outcomes ciate in the NBER’s Economic changes in tax policies, and the dynamics of been strong. It occurred in emerging mar- discussed here, later-born children experi- 612. and Parental Behavior,” forthcoming in Fluctuations and Growth Program markups and competition. kets such as China, India, and Mexico that ence higher rates of delinquency and crim- Return to Text Journal of Human Resources. and International Finance and For many decades, the assumed stability have opened up to international trade and inal behavior; this is at least partly attribut- 5 S. Black, E. Gronqvist, and B. Ockert, Return to Text Macroeconomics Program. He of factor shares — one of the “stylized facts” received outsourcing from developed coun- able to time investments of parents. “Born to Lead? The Effect of Birth Order 11 V. Hotz and J. Pantano, “Strategic serves as a member of the board of about growth codified by Nicholas Kaldor tries such as the United States. on Non-Cognitive Abilities,” NBER Parenting, Birth Order, and School editors of the American Economic in 1961 — meant that the modern macro- Where available, we use the labor share 1 G. Becker, “An Economic Analysis Working Paper No. 23393, May 2017. Performance,” NBER Working Paper No. Review and as an associate edi- economics literature paid little attention of income in the corporate sector as our of Fertility,” in Demographic and Return to Text 19542, October 2013, and Journal of tor of the Journal of Monetary to trends in the functional distribution of preferred measure of the labor share, as it Economic Change in Developed 6 L. Borghans, A. Duckworth, J. Population Economics, 28(4), 2015, pp. Economics. Prior to joining the income.1 Measurement challenges and the excludes many unincorporated enterprises Countries, New York, Columbia Heckman, and B. ter Weel, “The 911-936. University of Minnesota, he was absence of long time series for more than a and sole proprietors whose income is dif- University Press, 1960, pp. 209–40; Economics and Psychology of Personality Return to Text an associate professor of econom- small set of countries likely also played a role ficult to split between labor and capital. G. Becker and H. Lewis, “Interaction Traits,” Journal of Human Resources, 12 F. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth ics at the University of Chicago’s in dampening economists’ interest in the Further, our measure is not influenced by Between Q uantity and Q uality of 43, 2008, pp. 972–1059. Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Booth School of Business. He has evolution of factor shares over time.2 the government sector, which lacks market Children,” in Economics of the Family: Return to Text Lives, New York, Pantheon Books, 1996. served as a senior research econo- Marriage, Children, and Human 7 S. Black, P. Devereux, K. Salvanes, Return to Text mist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Capital, 1974, pp. 81–90; G. Becker “Healthy (?), Wealthy, and Wise: 13 S. Breining, J. Doyle, D. Figlio, K. Minneapolis. Average Change in Labor Share, 1975–2012 and N. Tomes, “Child Endowments, and Birth Order and Adult Health, NBER Karbownik, J. Roth, “Birth Order and Karabarbounis’s research the Q uantity and Q uality of Children,” Working Paper No. 21337, July 2015. Delinquency: Evidence from Denmark interests are in macroeconomics, Percentage point change per decade Return to Text labor economics, and international 10 NBER Working Paper No. 123, February and Florida,” NBER Working Paper No. Brazil 1976. 8 L. Argys, D. Rees, S. Averett, and B. 23038, January 2017. finance. His latest research focuses Return to Text Return to Text on topics such as the global decline 5 South Korea Witoonchart, “Birth Order and Risky TurkeyGreat Britain in labor’s share of income, produc- tivity and capital flows in south- 0 ern Europe, cyclicality and disper- United StatesCanada Japan France −5 Italy Germany sion in labor market outcomes, and China the effects of unemployment insur- ance policy on macroeconomic −10 outcomes. He is a recipient of the −15 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship, Poland awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Mexico Foundation. He received his −20 Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard Each bar represents one country. Sample includes all countries with at least 15 years of data University and an undergraduate Source: L. Karabarbounis and B. Neiman, NBER Working Paper No. 19136 degree from the Athens University of Economics and Business. Figure 1 18 NBER Reporter • No. 4, December 2017 NBER Reporter • No. 4, December 2017 19 prices for its output, or by the residen- for instance, might be important for capital-labor ratio in response to a per- explain the other half? We use investment related trend influencing the financ- tial sector (that has a labor share of specific countries but are unlikely to centage change in the relative cost of labor flows data to separate residual payments ing of global investment.10 Whereas in zero), whose share of the total GDP account for much of the overall trend and capital — is greater than one, the low- into payments to capital and economic 1980 household saving funded most fluctuates for reasons potentially unre- that the world has experienced.