The Belgian labor share, measured as the part of GDP going to labor, is declining. This evolution fits into the global secular trend of decreasing labor shares. A novel strand in the literature focusses on its firm-level drivers. Recent research in the United States claims that superstar firms, defined as large firms with a dominant market share, are increasing their market share and link this to the fall of the labor share (Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson & Van Reenen, 2017). Using a long time series of Belgian firm-level data from 1985 -2014, we link the rise of superstar firms to the decrease of the labor share in Manufacturing, Wholesale & Retail and Transportation & Storage. These three sectors represent approximately two-thirds of the Belgian economy.
Using a rich sample of firms in 14 EU countries from 2000 to 2016, we confirm increases in productivity dispersion, wage dispersion and superstar firms. Beyond reaffirming an incomplete pass‐through from productivity to wages, we present novel empirical evidence of an even weaker pass‐through in industries dominated by superstar firms. This effect is observed in both the lower and upper parts of the productivity and wage distributions, and is stronger for tradable (versus non‐tradable) sectors and markets with low (versus high) collective bargaining power. These findings point to different mechanisms, consistent with theoretical work and various underlying structural changes in the economy.
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