美联储-企业减税与制造业劳动力份额下降（英）-2023.8-68页_5mb

Summary of "Corporate Tax Cuts and the Decline of the Manufacturing Labor Share"

Core Finding:
Corporate tax cuts reduce the manufacturing labor share in the U.S. and across OECD countries by reallocating output toward capital-intensive firms, thereby depressing overall labor demand.

Key Economic Channels:

• Lower corporate tax rates decrease the effective cost of capital relative to labor, disproportionately benefiting capital-intensive firms.
• This shifts market share toward capital-intensive production, lowering the industry-wide labor share.
• The magnitude of the labor share decline depends on the dispersion of factor intensities and initial labor share in the industry.

Empirical Evidence:

• A 30 to 60% attribution of the U.S. manufacturing labor share decline (1950s–2010s) is linked to corporate tax reductions.
• Cross-country analyses show a strong positive correlation (correlation coefficient of 0.71 for manufacturing) between tax rate cuts and labor share declines.
• State-level data confirm that regions with steeper tax cuts experienced sharper labor share declines.

Mechanism and Quantitative Analysis:

• A theoretical model incorporating heterogeneous firms demonstrates that tax cuts drive reallocation away from labor-intensive firms.
• Simulations predict that a 30-point reduction in the U.S. corporate tax rate (e.g., from 50% to 20%) reduces the labor share by about 13.4 percentage points.
• Sectoral variations are due to differences in tax elasticities and effective corporate tax rates.

Broader Implications:

• The findings highlight that tax cuts amplify market concentration toward capital-intensive producers, reducing employment concentration despite output shifts.
• The service sector, however, shows a counter-trend increase in labor share, attributed to non-tax factors like long-term wage trends and minimal tax elasticity.
• Policy reforms, such as the 2017 U.S. tax law, could further exacerbate labor share declines, with combined impacts on corporate and labor taxes potentially reducing the labor share by an additional 17 percentage points.

Conclusion:
Corporate tax reductions are a significant, though not sole, driver of declining labor shares in manufacturing. The results underscore the need to account for tax-induced reallocation effects in labor market and growth analyses.