The Micro-Level Anatomy of the Labor Share Decline
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-12
Abstract
The labor share in U.S. manufacturing declined from 62 percentage points (ppts) in 1967 to 41 ppts in 2012. The labor share of the typical U.S. manufacturing establishment, in contrast, rose by over 3 ppts during the same period. Using micro-level data, we document five salient facts: (1) since the 1980s, there has been a dramatic reallocation of value added toward the lower end of the labor share distribution; (2) this aggregate reallocation is not due to entry/exit, to 'superstars" growing faster or to large establishments lowering their labor shares, but is instead due to units whose labor share fell as they grew in size; (3) low labor share (LL) establishments benefit from high revenue labor productivity, not low wages; (4) they also enjoy a product price premium relative to their peers, pointing to a significant role for demand-side forces; and (5) they have only temporarily lower labor shares that rebound after five to eight years. This transient pattern has become more pronounced over time, and the dynamics of value added and employment are increasingly disconnected.
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:
demand,
market,
production,
macroeconomic,
manufacturing,
sale,
growth,
labor productivity,
labor,
price,
employment growth,
turnover,
trend,
revenue,
workforce,
productivity dispersion,
wage growth,
productivity dynamics,
decline,
labor statistics,
labor markets,
trends labor,
share
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identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Annual Survey of Manufactures,
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
National Science Foundation,
Total Factor Productivity,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
Cobb-Douglas,
Labor Productivity,
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
Census of Manufacturing Firms,
Economic Census,
North American Industry Classification System,
TFPQ,
Value Added
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