Working Papers

The wage share of GDP in the long run: Class power and economic cycles in the U.S., 1870-2009

Contributes to the resurgent interest in studies of the labor share (the ratio of total wage and salary compensation to GDP).  Other research on this topic has mostly focused on international comparative studies or industry-level analysis.  I look only at the U.S. but over an exceptionally long period of time.  Examining such a long historical record reveals that while cyclical variation in the wage share is determined by workers’ collective bargaining power, the wage share also displays long-term regularity in the sense that the ups and downs produced by power dynamics tend to circle around a fairly constant long-term center of gravity.  I develop a theory to explain both the cyclical power dynamics and the long-term average.  The theory and the data suggest that when workers bargaining power increases it can’t alter the long-term center of gravity, but it can reduce the size (amplitude) of the cycles.  Workers’ power therefore stabilizes the wage share and contributes to macroeconomic stability.

Antagonistic Cooperation: Class conflict and compromise in democratic capitalism

This paper builds on Wright’s theory of class compromise in the context of democratic capitalist countries as described by Przeworksi.  It contributes to the theory of class compromise, arguing that it is a foundational institution of capitalist democracies that enables these countries to stay within a distribution of income that prevents certain types of crises.  However, a perpetual tug-of-war in the form of latent class conflict remains a feature of all market economies and this latent conflict can be both functional (in which case it reinforces the class compromise) or dysfunctional (in which case it threatens societies by provoking inadvertent economic crises).

Wikipedia, Citizendium, Knol: The challenges of self-governance and legitimacy in peer-to-peer knowledge production

My personal interest in open-source software led me to write an institutional analysis of Wikipedia for Erik Wright’s Real Utopias graduate seminar.  Following comparison to some open source software foundations, I argue that, to function in large scale, it appears that Wikipedia may require a hybrid of both physically-centered and web-based dispersed governance structures.  While this version was prepared for journal submission, portions of the original paper were incorporated into Chapter 7 of Erik Wrights’ Envisioning Real Utopias.

Positional power: a theory and empirics of workers’ collective bargaining power

Updates Luca Perrone’s unfinished theory of “positional power” using recent developments in the techniques of input-output analysis to show how industrial interdependencies influence inter-industry differentials in workers’ bargaining power.  The measure of bargaining power embodied in positional power is then used to empirically analyze industry-level wages and strike propensities.

Projects in early phases of development

Class structure and income distribution in the U.S.

Attempts to measure the share of national income flowing to classes as a contribution to studies of the growth of inequality in the neoliberal era.  While first conceived as building upon the neo-Marxian class analysis project, it has evolved into a theoretical synthesis of Marxian and Weberian ideas.

The social basis of financialization

Studies of financialization have thus far not focused on U.S. households very much.  However, at least one recent study has shown that financialization has exacerbated inequality.  This paper argues that growing inequality among households actually contributed to the rise of finance.  There appears to be a self-perpetuating dynamic in which inequality and financialization feed each other.