Labor share

Despite fluctuating over the business cycle, the wage share was once thought to be stable, which Keynes described as "one of the most surprising, yet best-established facts in the whole range of economic statistics".

[3]: 2 The importance of the distribution of income between the factors of production – capital, land and labor – has long been recognized.

Ricardo (1817) said that to determine the laws which regulate this distribution is the "principal problem in political economy".

[11] Cobb and Douglas's Theory of Production (1928) introduced empirically determined constants α and β which corresponded to the capital and labor share respectively.

Historical measurements of the wage share can be charted using the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's FRED tool, which includes time series published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics[13] and Bureau of Economic Analysis.