关键词：
Economics
摘要：
Economic inequality has increased sharply over the past few decades, motivating an explosion of macroeconomic research on understanding the causes and consequences of these trends. Understanding the drivers of rising inequality is important---not only because of an interest in inequality itself, but also because the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies often depends crucially on the nature and extent of heterogeneity across various economic actors. In my dissertation, I focus on explaining secular movements in the labor share of national income, and in the distribution of wealth. Why are workers receiving a smaller fraction of every dollar spent? Why is wealth so heavily concentrated at the top, and why has wealth inequality been surging? I also contribute, more technically, to understanding the nature of earnings dynamics over a worker's life-cycle. The first chapter studies the labor share of income in the post-war U.S. economy. I characterize its long-run behavior as a race between preferences and technology. On the one hand, those advances in technology that improve machines put downward pressure on the labor share. Crucial for this mechanism is the capital-labor elasticity, a key macroeconomic parameter, which I estimate with disaggregated production data, and taking into account input-output linkages. Given my estimate of an above-unitary elasticity, investment-specific technical change depresses the labor share. On the other hand, technological advances fuel economic growth. Using household spending data linked to the production side, I show that rising levels of real income are accompanied by a shift of consumption towards labor-intensive goods and services. Holding constant relative prices, the labor share increases. I find that the stability of the aggregate labor share until the early 1980s masked these two offsetting effects. Subsequently, the investment-specificity of technical change increased, manifesting itself in rapidly falling relative equipmen
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