IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/stiaaa/2025-01-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Superstars, shooting stars, and the labour share: Cross-country evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Won Hee Cho
  • Francesco Manaresi
  • Martin Reinhard

Abstract

Recent analyses linked the decline of the US labour share over past decades to reallocation favouring highly productive “superstar” firms with low labour shares, and “shooting stars”, firms experiencing transient labour share drops and productivity surges. This work provides novel cross-country evidence on the productivity-labour share nexus over recent decades. Productivity and labour shares are inversely related, both at the firm and industry levels. Reallocation to firms with persistently low labour shares significantly reduces aggregate labour shares across countries, whereas shooting stars play only a limited role. Persistent low labour share firms are a specific type of productivity superstar characterised by low wages and high capital intensity. Their rise is related to productivity divergence within industries and rising export volumes. These findings raise concerns about the extent to which the workforce benefits from aggregate productivity growth, and suggests the importance of policies that can strengthen the productivity-wage link.

Suggested Citation

  • Won Hee Cho & Francesco Manaresi & Martin Reinhard, 2025. "Superstars, shooting stars, and the labour share: Cross-country evidence," OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers 2025/01, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:stiaaa:2025/01-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Cross-Country Analysis; Labour Share; Productivity; Reallocation; Shooting Star Firms; Structural Determinants; Superstar Firms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E2 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence

    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:oec:stiaaa:2025/01-en. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/scoecfr.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.