Research

Peer Reviewed Articles

  • 2018. "Productivity and income distribution: Implications for the Colombian minimum wage, 2001-2016." (In Spanish: "Productividad y distribucion del ingreso: implicaciones sobre el salario mínimo colombiano, 2001-2016.") Revista de Economía Institucional, Vol. 20(39) 231-255. https://doi.org/10.18601/01245996.v20n39.10

Working Papers

Works in Progress

  • "Gender Wage Gap, Wage-Productivity Decoupling, and the Rate of Profit."

This paper proposes an extension to the usual decomposition method of the profit rate to account for two tendencies that have been parallel to the neoliberal era in the US: the decline of the gender wage gap (GWG) and wage-productivity decoupling (WPD). With this approach it is possible to account for the impacts of the GWG and the WPD on the profit rate tendencies. This framework also allows studying the overall workers' income distribution by gender. I use this framework and simple counterfactual analysis to analyze the US manufacturing sector from 1960-2017. I find that gender wage inequality was a source of profitability, especially before 1986, but it slowly petered out. Since 2001, increases in the profit share have mostly been due to wage-productivity decoupling.


  • "Financialization, Profit Rates, and Capital Stocks."

This paper proposes an analysis of financialization from the perspective of the profit rates and capital flows between financial (FCB) and nonfinancial corporations (NFCB). One element to define financialization is the increasing share of the financial sector in the total economy, measured as the percentage of profits of FCB over the entire pool of profits of corporations. Data shows that in the US, this process took place mainly from the early 1980s to the 2008 crisis. Some authors have associated it with a higher rate of return for FCB. They propose the hypothesis that FCB experienced a higher profit rate than NFCB during these three decades. There is an issue with this hypothesis: given the possibility of capital flowing between different sectors, it is problematic to assume that the rate of profit in one sector can be steadily higher than the rest of the economy for long periods. The main idea of this paper is to empirically test how much of the higher participation of the FCB in the total profits of corporations is associated with a sustained higher rate of profit and how much of it is due to capital flowing to financial activities. To test it, I use an index decomposition analysis where the share of FCB profits over total corporate profits can be decomposed by the rate of profit ratio between sectors and their capital stock ratio. Some preliminary results show that the financialization period is strongly associated with a higher capital stock concentration in the FCB sector. The initial results contest the hypothesis that explains the higher share of FCB profits due to a sustained rate of profit in the financial sector