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The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

International audienceThis paper investigates the relationship between the labour share and financial crises. While Diwan (2001) or Maarek et al. (2013) focused on the currency crisis, we propose to see if their analyses can be extended to the banking crisis and how it can influence the relative bargaining power of labour and capital within firms. To this end, we use international panel data of the share of labour in GDP. We confirm the existence of a negative trend for the labour share, which is largely explained by financial crises. However, the results differ for currency and banking crises. Currency crises affect the labour share negatively, while banking crises primarily affect capital income, at least during the year of the crisis. In the three years following a currency crisis, the labour share tends to be reduced by around 2% per year on average

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