Kaldor and Piketty's facts: The rise of monopoly power in the United States

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Eggertsson, Gauti B.; Robbins, Jacob A.; Wold, Ella Getz
• 署名单位: Brown University; University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Chicago Hospital; BI Norwegian Business School
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2021.09.007
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: S19-S38
• 关键词: Monopoly power; Secular stagnation; labor share; Tobin's Q

摘要

The macroeconomic data of the last fifty years have overturned at least two of Kaldor's famous stylized growth facts: constant interest rates, and a constant labor share. At the same time, the research of Piketty and others has introduced several new and surprising facts: an increase in the financial wealth-to-output ratio in the US, an increase in measured Tobin's Q, and a divergence between the marginal and average returns on capital. In this paper, we argue that these trends can be explained by an increase in market power and pure profits in the US economy-that is, the emergence of a non-zero-rent economy-along with forces that have led to a persistent long-term decline in real interest rates. We make three parsimonious modifications to the standard neoclassical model to explain these trends. Using recent estimates of the increase in markups and the decrease in real interest rates, we show that our model can quantitatively match these new stylized macroeconomic facts. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.