Productive knowledge, economic sophistication, and labor share

•Economic sophistication shows the productive knowledge of a country.•Productive knowledge is embedded in labor, which increases workers’ bargaining power.•Cross-country evidence shows that economic sophistication increases labor share.•This phenomenon applies equally to both OECD and non-OECD countries.•The positive relationship between economic sophistication and labor share is conditional upon the level of human capital. We present economic sophistication, the ability to produce complex products, as a potential determinant of labor share. Economic sophistication requires specific skills and tacit knowledge embedded in labor. It increases the bargaining power of workers, resulting in a higher labor share. We are the first to present economic sophistication as a potential determinant of labor share. We employ a fixed-effect model using panel data from 98 countries observed from 1970–2015 to find that economic sophistication has a positive and statistically significant effect on labor share. This positive effect applies to both OECD and non-OECD countries. A one standard deviation increase in economic sophistication increases labor share by about 3 percent, which corresponds to about 1.6 percentage points increase relative to the mean. Further, we show that economic sophistication and human capital have a substantial interaction effect that varies across OECD and non-OECD countries.