Commentators often follow David Ricardo in looking, especially, at chapters Vand VI of Book I of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as the place to find his theory of value. And most commentators attribute to Adam Smith some versions of a labor theory of value. But in those chapters, Smith is...

The received view does not associate David Hume with the genesis of the labor theory of value, but as is argued here, Hume issued a number of key propositions that belong to the labor theory of value such that he rightly belongs to the classical school of political economy. Hume articulated both...

Adam Smith's inquiry into the emergence and stability of the self-organization of the division of labor in commodity exchange is considered using statistical equilibrium methods from statistical physics. We develop a statistical equilibrium model of the distribution of independent direct...

This paper examines heterodox theories of the determinants of the value of money. Orthodox approaches that tie money's value to relative scarcity of money or to the price level are rejected as inconsistent with the monetary theory of production embraced by heterodox traditions linked to Marx,...

Purpose - The correlations and deviations between market prices, production prices and values are critical indexes for testing the labor theory of value. However, there is not yet a universally accepted method of solving for the production price vector, and given the complexity and volatility of...

In the classical economists' surplus approach retrieved by Sraffa (1951; 1960) and Garegnani ([1960] 2024), institutions regulate the material basis of society and, in particular, the extraction and distribution of the social surplus. In this regard, classical theory provides a material anchor,...