Trades unions, market concentration and income distribution in United States manufacturing industry

This paper uses three- and four-digit cross-sections of United States manufacturing industries in 1972 in order to test a Kaleckian degree of monopoly theory of income distribution. Various measures of labour share are regressed on the four-firm concentration ratio, the advertising-sales ratio, a measure of capital intensity and a unionisation variable. In contrast to earlier studies for the U.S. strong evidence is found of a negative relationship between in particular production worker wage share and concentration and advertising intensity, and evidence of a positive relationship between wage share and the level of unionisation.