IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wil/wileco/2001-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Getting Income Shares Right

Author

Listed:

Abstract

Many widely used economic models implicitly assume that income shares should be identical across time and space. Although time series data from industrial countries appear consistent with this notion, cross-section data generally appear to contradict the assumption of constant income shares. A commonly used calculation suggests that labor shares of national income vary from about 0.05 to about 0.80 in international cross-section data. This paper suggests, however, that this widely used approach underestimates the labor income of the self-employed and other proprietors. Several adjustments for calculating labor shares are identified and compared. All of them yield data that appear broadly consistent with the hypothesis that labor shares for most countries fall in the range of 0.65 to 0.80

Suggested Citation

  • Douglas Gollin, 2001. "Getting Income Shares Right," Department of Economics Working Papers 2001-11, Department of Economics, Williams College.
    • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2001-11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Gollin_Getting_Income_Shares_Right_working_paper_with_figures.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mancur Olson, 1996. "Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government: Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations Are Rich, and Others Poor," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 10(2), pages 3-24, Spring.
    2. Alwyn Young, 1994. "The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience," NBER Working Papers 4680, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. F. A. Lutz, 1961. "The Theory of Capital," International Economic Association Series, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-1-349-08452-4 edited by D. C. Hague, December.
    4. Alwyn Young, 1995. "The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(3), pages 641-680.
    5. Nicholas Kaldor, 1961. "Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth," International Economic Association Series, in: D. C. Hague (ed.), The Theory of Capital, chapter 0, pages 177-222, Palgrave Macmillan.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Santos, João & Domingos, Tiago & Sousa, Tânia & St. Aubyn, Miguel, 2016. "Does a small cost share reflect a negligible role for energy in economic production? Testing for aggregate production functions including capital, labor, and useful exergy through a cointegration-base," MPRA Paper 70850, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. James Riedel, 2007. "The Tyranny of Numbers or the Tyranny of Methodology: Explaining the East Asian Growth Experience," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 8(2), pages 385-396, November.
    3. Joao Paulo A. de Souza, 2014. "Real wages and labor-saving technical change: evidence from a panel of manufacturing industries in mature and labor-surplus economies," UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers 2014-03, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics.
    4. Hofman, André A., 2000. "The economic development of Latin America in the twentieth century," Copublicaciones, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), number 1650 edited by Eclac.
    5. Jones, C.I., 2016. "The Facts of Economic Growth," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 3-69, Elsevier.
    6. Zuleta, Hernando, 2012. "Variable factor shares, measurement and growth accounting," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 114(1), pages 91-93.
    7. Hernando Zuleta, 2015. "Getting Growth Accounting Right," Documentos CEDE 13814, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    8. Zuleta, Hernando, 2009. "If factor shares are not constant then we have a measurment problem. can we solve it?," Documentos de Trabajo 5744, Universidad del Rosario.
    9. John A. List & Haiwen Zhou, 2007. "Internal Increasing Returns to Scale and Economic Growth," NBER Working Papers 12999, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. D., Ivan, 2017. "Stability of the labour shares: evidence from OECD economies," MPRA Paper 79822, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Ottaviano, Gianmarco & Peri, Giovanni, 2008. "Immigration and National Wages: Clarifying the Theory and the Empirics," CEPR Discussion Papers 6916, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    12. Gilberto Tadeu Lima, 2000. "Market concentration and technological innovation in a dynamic model of growth and distribution," BNL Quarterly Review, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, vol. 53(215), pages 447-475.
    13. van de Klundert, T.C.M.J. & Smulders, J.A., 1991. "Reconstructing growth theory : A survey," Other publications TiSEM 19355c51-17eb-4d5d-aa66-b, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    14. Kevin S. Nell & Maria M. De Mello, 2019. "The interdependence between the saving rate and technology across regimes: evidence from South Africa," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 56(1), pages 269-300, January.
    15. V. V. Chari & Patrick J. Kehoe & Ellen R. McGrattan, 1996. "The Poverty of Nations: A Quantitative Exploration," NBER Working Papers 5414, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Rajnish Mehra & Facundo Piguillem & Edward C. Prescott, 2011. "Costly financial intermediation in neoclassical growth theory," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 2(1), pages 1-36, March.
    17. Li, Defu & Bental, Benjamin & Huang, Jiuli, 2016. "Stationary Growth and the Impossibility of Capital Efficiency Gains," MPRA Paper 71516, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Alonso-Carrera, Jaime & Raurich, Xavier, 2015. "Demand-based structural change and balanced economic growth," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 359-374.
    19. Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano & Giovanni Peri, 2021. "Rethinking The Effect Of Immigration On Wages," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Firms and Workers in a Globalized World Larger Markets, Tougher Competition, chapter 9, pages 245-290, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    20. Olivier Allain, 2006. "La modération salariale : le point de vue des (néo-)kaleckiens," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00196500, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    self employment; factor shares; income shares; labor shares;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E25 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Aggregate Factor Income Distribution
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • E13 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Neoclassical

    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:wil:wileco:2001-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 bibliographic 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Stephen Sheppard (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edwilus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.