After the 1980s, advanced capitalist economies witnessed a significant decline of the wage share in income. Along with the conventional view, which ascribes this decline to technological factors and international trade, another line of enquiry has endorsed a ‘political economy’ approach and identified several drivers of the wage share erosion. Yet, the role of persistent changes in unemployment has remained relatively unexplored. We try to fill this gap moving from a recent contribution by Anwar Shaikh, who analyzed the relation between unemployment and changes in income distribution in the US economy. We study this relationship by adopting a long-term approach, and two alternative measures of labor market slack. We extend Shaikh's method of analysis to eight mature economies, and in addition we approach the analysis with other econometric techniques. Results generally confirm the adverse impact of unemployment on the labor share, while do not support the notion of equilibrium unemployment.

1980年代以后，发达的资本主义经济体的工资收入份额显着下降。除了传统的观点认为归因于技术因素和国际贸易的下降外，另一种调查方法也认可了“政治经济”方法，并确定了工资份额下降的几种驱动因素。然而，失业率持续变化的作用仍未得到充分探讨。我们试图通过安瓦尔·谢赫（Anwar Shaikh）的最新贡献来填补这一空白，后者分析了美国经济中失业与收入分配变化之间的关系。我们通过采用长期方法和劳动力市场疲软的两种替代方法来研究这种关系。我们将谢赫的分析方法扩展到八个成熟经济体，此外，我们还使用其他计量经济学技术来进行分析。结果通常证实失业对劳动份额的不利影响，但不支持均衡失业的概念。