The Missing Link: Monetary Policy and The Labor Share

The textbook New-Keynesian (NK) model implies that the labor share is pro-cyclical conditional on a monetary policy shock. We present evidence that a monetary policy tightening robustly increased the labor share and decreased real wages and labor productivity during the Great Moderation period in the US, the Euro Area, the UK, Australia, and Canada. We show that this is inconsistent not only with the basic NK model, but with a wide variety of NK models commonly used for monetary policy analysis and where the direct link between the labor share and the markup can be broken.