IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed018/943.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Corporate Tax Cuts and the Decline of the Labor Share

Author

Listed:
  • Baris Kaymak

    (Universite de Montreal)

  • Immo Schott

    (Université de Montréal)

Abstract

We document a strong empirical connection between corporate taxation and the labor’s share of income in the manufacturing sector across OECD countries. The estimates indicate that the decline in corporate taxes is, on average, associated with 40% of the observed decline in labor’s share. We then present a model of industry dynamics where firms differ in their capital intensity as well as their productivity. A drop in the corporate tax rate reduces the labor share by shifting the distribution of production towards capital intensive firms. Industry con- centration rises as a result, and firm entry falls, consistent with the US experience documented in Kehrig and Vincent (2017) and Autor et al. (2017). Calibration of the model to the US economy indicates that corporate tax cuts explain at least a third of the decline in labor’s share in the US manufacturing industry.

Suggested Citation

  • Baris Kaymak & Immo Schott, 2018. "Corporate Tax Cuts and the Decline of the Labor Share," 2018 Meeting Papers 943, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed018:943
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2018/paper_943.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hopenhayn, Hugo & Rogerson, Richard, 1993. "Job Turnover and Policy Evaluation: A General Equilibrium Analysis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 101(5), pages 915-938, October.
    2. Gravelle, Jane G., 2004. "The Corporate Tax: Where Has It Been and Where Is It Going?," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 57(4), pages 903-923, December.
    3. Nicolas Vincent & Matthias Kehrig, 2017. "Growing Productivity without Growing Wages: The Micro-Level Anatomy of the Aggregate Labor Share Decline," 2017 Meeting Papers 739, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    4. Autor, David & Dorn, David & Katz, Lawrence F. & Patterson, Christina & Van Reenen, John, 2017. "The fall of the Labor share and the rise of superstar firms," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 83616, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Corporate Tax Cuts and the Decline of the Labor Share
      by Christian Zimmermann in NEP-DGE blog on 2018-10-14 03:13:21

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed018:943. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christian Zimmermann). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.