The Belgian labor share, measured as the part of GDP going to labor, is declining. This evolution fits into the global secular trend of decreasing labor shares. A novel strand in the literature focusses on its firm-level drivers. Recent research in the United States claims that superstar firms, defined as large firms with a dominant market share, are increasing their market share and link this to the fall of the labor share (Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson & Van Reenen, 2017). Using a long time series of Belgian firm-level data from 1985 – 2014, we link the rise of superstar firms to the decrease of the labor share in Manufacturing, Wholesale & Retail and Transportation & Storage. These three sectors represent approximately two-thirds of the Belgian economy.
