Macroeconomic effects of a declining wage share: A meta‐analysis of the functional income distribution and aggregate demand

Abstract

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the functional distribution of income and aggregate demand, which investigates whether declining wage shares increase (“profit‐led”) or decrease (“wage‐led”) demand. It conducts a meta‐regression analysis of 33 studies with 578 estimates for total and domestic demand, covering up to 163 years and 59 countries and regions. Our results suggest that, on average and across all countries, total demand is predominantly profit‐led and domestic demand mainly wage‐led. The effects in the literature range between 0.8 and −0.3 within one standard deviation for domestic demand and between 0.4 and −0.7 for total demand, which are economically significant at the outer bounds. We find mixed evidence for publication selectivity, which may affect the size but not the direction of the results in the literature. If one was to nonetheless correct for this, then total demand would be less profit‐led or statistically insignificant. A set of moderator variables, including publication characteristics, estimation strategies, the covariates included in the studies’ estimation functions, and, in particular, controls for time and space, help explain the variation in the empirical estimates.