To make high-quality research more accessible and easier to explore.

Fields:

Wages, Profits, and Rent-Sharing

Quarterly Journal of Economics 1996 111(1), 227-251 open access
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 rentsharing reasons alone, at approximately 24 percent of the mean wage.