In order to understand from where the profits or monetary profits of capitalists and firms emerge the author examined the phrase of Marx, 'Die Gesamtklasse der Kapitalisten kann nichts aus der Zirkulation herausziehen, was nicht vorher hineingeworfen war.' (The class of capitalists cannot...

Bruun and Heyn-Johnsen (2009) state the paradox that economics has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of how monetary profits are generated, even though the generation of a physical surplus is an established aspect of non-neoclassical economics. They emphasise that our ability to...

The paradox of monetary profits has been a recurrent theme in macroeconomics since the problem was first formulated by Marx. Capitalists as a whole can at most get from workers, what they already paid out in wages. Marx did not solve this problem, and neither did Keynes, who had to face the...

This paper documents the dynamic properties of the current account, trade balance and international capital flows. For this purpose, two approaches are taken: probit and a nonparametric estimation. The probabilistic approach shows that, in general, deficits and net inflows tend to be more...

Use of a promise to pay by a bank to insure an outstanding loan in order to return the value of the insured amount into capital for use in writing a new loan is an invention in banking with calculably greater potential economic impact than the original invention of reserve banking. The...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

The Cobb-Douglas function is today one of the most widely-adopted assumptions in economic modeling, yet both its theoretical and empirical basis have long been under question. The purpose of this paper is to build an alternative production function on neoclassical microfoundations to address...

A popular interpretation of the Rational Expectations/Efficient Markets hypothesis states that, if the hypothesis holds, then market valuations must follow a random walk. This postulate has frequently been criticized on the basis of empirical evidence. Yet the assertion itself incurs what we...

Economic policy interventions of a scale as effected in eastern Germany can be expected to have a significant impact on the economy, which may be in accordance with the objectives of the policy measures or manifest itself in distortions of several kinds. This paper analyzes the structural...

An evolutionary model of the bank size distribution is presented based on the exchange and expansion of deposit money. In agreement with empirical results the derived size distribution is lognormal with a power law tail. The key idea of the theory is to regard the creation of money as a slow...