Development and sectoral labor income shares

The macroeconomic literature assumes that sectoral labor income shares and output per person are uncorrelated across countries. This paper shows that the data reject this assumption for a large set of countries. The labor shares of the manufacturing and market services sectors systematically increase with output per person relative to those of other sectors, leading to a shift of labor income across sectors with economic development. The empirical evidence suggests that capital deepening and cross-sector differences in the degree of capital-labor substitutability may be important for understanding these patterns. Researchers can directly use the provided dataset of labor shares to calibrate macroeconomic models.