Assessing Piketty’s laws of capitalism
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper tests Piketty's predictions that in the long run (i) the capital-income ratio, K-Y, is driven by the ratio between the rates of saving and income growth, s and g; and that (ii) the capital share of income responds to variations in the s-g ratio, along with the rate of return on capital, r. We assess the two predictions using both Piketty and Zucman's (2014) original data and a new long historical dataset covering 21 OECD countries. Our findings corroborate Piketty’s theory in the very long run (1870-2010), whilst evidence for the latest decades is less robust (1970-2010). * Prof. Jakob B. Madsen, Department of Economics, Monash University, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, VIC 3145, Australia † Prof. Antonio Minniti, Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Piazza Scaravilli n. 2, 40126, Bologna, Italy ‡ Dr. Francesco Venturini, Department of Economics, University of Perugia, via Pascoli 20, 06123, Perugia, Italy & NIESR, London, UK © 2015 Jakob B. Madsen, Antonio Minniti and Francesco Venturini All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author. monash.edu/ business-economics ABN 12 377 614 012 CRICOS Provider No. 00008C
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