Estimating the Cost of Capital and the Profit Share

Abstract

Capital costs are not directly observed since firms own part of their capital stock. I show under which assumptions variation in firms’ input choices reveals the user cost of capital. Using Compustat data for the United States, I find that the costs of tangible capital as a share of output have not been increasing while economic profits have been increasing over the past 50 years from around 4% to around 9% of sales. About three-quarters of the fall in the labour share is associated with a rise in profits and the remainder is associated with a rise in intangible intensity.