This paper is the first part of a Marxian critique of the theory of the firm, focusing on the analysis of labour values. Starting from Adam Smith's example of the deer hunter marginal analysis is introduced, culminating in the derivation of the Labour Value Function as the supply curve of the...

The purpose of this article is to reveal the justifications for different production boundaries historically. It finds that the boundaries were and are predicated on an untenable productive/unproductive dichotomy that was justified on select and shifting cultural norms. Furthermore, the...

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...

Publication by INSEE of very long time series of national accounts makes it possible to have a look on the distribution of value-added and its evolution in France for nearly sixty years. Apart from updating the conclusions, this article studies to which extent conceptual and methodological...

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...

Kalecki’s profit theory has always been popular among heterodox economist as an alternative approach to solve the paradox of monetary profits. In the present paper his formula ‘The workers spend what they get, the capitalists get what they spend’ is scrutinized for its logical and factual...

In this paper I critically analyze the relationship that professors Dornbusch and Fischer establish among the concepts of GNP, NNP and aggregate income. In principle, aggregate income is NNP; indeed, the whole point of introducing the concept of NNP is to determine what is the income of the...

According to Ricardo the principal problem in Political Economy is to determine the laws which regulate the distribution of profits, rents, and wages. Ricardo determined the respective shares in real terms and to this end invented an engine of analysis that became paradigmatic. The present paper...

Production prices are those exchange-values which, if adopted, put each industry in the conditions to repeat its production process. In this sense they appear as necessary prices. This notion is here compared with that of ‘just’ price, studied by the older moral philosophers (more so than by...

This note examines Thomas Piketty's (2014) explanation and prediction of simultaneously rising capital income ratio and profit share by an elasticity of substitution, sigma, greater than one between labor and capital in an aggregate production function. I review Piketty's elasticity argument,...