Wages, Profits, and Rent-Sharing

Abstract

The paper suggests a new test for rent-sharing in the U. S. labor market. Using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector, it shows that a rise in a sector's profitability leads after some years to an increase in the long-run level of wages in that sector. The paper controls for workers' characteristics, for industry fixed effects, and for unionism. Lester's range of wages is estimated, for rent-sharing reasons alone, at approximately 24 percent of the mean wage.