Corporate Governance and the “Job Loss” Recovery

Abstract

The recent recovery continued a trend that started in the mid-1970s of a growing divergence between capital and labor incomes. This trend appears to be largely due to a shift in the balance of corporate governance. A growing concentration of financial assets among institutional investors was juxtaposed by a declining unionization rate. Consequently, institutional investors had the incentives and increasingly the ability to allocate a growing share of corporate resources towards capital, particularly in the form of share repurchases and dividend payouts instead.