Labour and Financial Crises: Is Labour Paying the Price of the Crisis?

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the labour share and financial crises. While Diwan (2001) or Maarek et al. (2013) focused on the currency crisis, we propose to see if their analyses can be extended to the banking crisis and how it can influence the relative bargaining power of labour and capital within firms. To this end, we use international panel data of the share of labour in GDP. We confirm the existence of a negative trend for the labour share, which is largely explained by financial crises. However, the results differ for currency and banking crises. Currency crises affect the labour share negatively, while banking crises primarily affect capital income, at least during the year of the crisis. In the three years following a currency crisis, the labour share tends to be reduced by around 2% per year on average.