Comment: Accounting for Factorless Income

Abstract

The title of this paper tells us that the goal of this analysis is to account for something called “factorless income.” Two immediate questions arise. What is factorless income? And why do we need to account for it? Although there are perhaps several motivations that might lead to this analysis, I think one prominent motivation stems from the interest in understanding the secular decline in the labor share that has been ob-served in the United States and other countries in the past several decades, a feature that the authors have documented in their previous work.