I believe this is the paper about the declining labor and capital shares mentioned in the article http://home.uchicago.edu/~barkai/doc/BarkaiDecliningLaborCap....
"A new working paper by Simcha Barkai, of the University of Chicago, concludes that, although the share of income flowing to workers has declined in recent decades, the share flowing to capital (ie, including robots) has shrunk faster. What has grown is the markup firms can charge over their production costs, ie, their profits. Similarly, an NBER working paper published in January argues that the decline in the labour share is linked to the rise of “superstar firms”. A growing number of markets are “winner takes most”, in which the dominant firm earns hefty profits."
...is about the third one I have seen lately that the current financial system is not good at doing what it is supposed to do: allocate capital investment.
And bringing in the idea of winner takes all market structures just seems like a non-sequitur. I'm struggling to understand the causal relationship between market structure and the relative shares of income that go to labour and capital owners.
1. The corporation's treasury, which is not economically useful past a certain point, or
2. Shareholders. In this case, since I don't see much evidence of major dividends, that would mean stock buy backs, which are not a great way of paying shareholders.
Returning money to shareholders is a great idea, if there is nothing better the corporation can do with it. If.
The paper is not making much sense to me, though.