This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper "Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?" (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the "circuit approach". While some "circuitistes" have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory,...

This paper explores the importance of the exercise of private and public power in the execution of contracts and defense of property rights at the local labor market level in the United States. Using Census microdata, we examine the rise of "Guard Labor"---classified as individuals employed in...

This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

We explore the relationships between aggregate profitability and women’s growing share of market work in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Using decomposition analysis and counterfactuals, we investigate whether the contribution of the declining wage share to the upswing in...

The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit has been at the center of theoretical and empirical debates within Marxian political economy ever since the publication of Volume III of Capital. An important limitation of this literature is the absence of a comprehensive econometric analysis...

This paper presents some estimates of the stock of the reserve army of labour, and flows into and out of the reserve army of labour for the postwar U.S. economy. Estimates of stocks are presented for the period 1948 - 2011 at a monthly frequency; 6 month moving average estimates of flows into...

Building on Marx's insights in Chapter 25, Volume I of Capital, an augmented version of the cyclical profit squeeze (CPS) theory offers a plausible explanation of macroeconomic fluctuations under capitalism. The pattern of dynamic interactions that emerges from a 3-variable (profit share,...

This paper analyzes labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content (LDLC) originally formulated by Farjoun and Machover (1983). First, it is shown that the standard measures of labor productivity may be rather misleading, owing to their emphasis on monetary aggregates. Instead, the...

This paper highlights the separation between surplus value production and realization in Marx's work. A new method of estimating surplus value production at the industry level is proposed and implemented. Marx's procedure of transforming labor values into prices of production shows that...