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,...

Using cross country regressions, this paper constructs a novel distance-to-frontier metric for tracking broad socio-onomic inequality (including access of the poor to health infrastructure) over time for individual countries. Given the unavailability of reliable and consistent direct measures of...

This paper offers a synoptic account of the state of the debate within Marxist scholars regarding the current structural crisis of capitalism, identifies two broad streams within the literature dealing, in turn, with aggregate demand and profitability problems, and proceeds to concentrate on an...

This paper empirically tests for two competing explanations of the increasing sex ratio at birth (SRB) in India: hepatitis B and human intervention. Estimating a male- preferring stopping rule with data from three rounds of the National Family Health Survey in India (1992, 1998 and 2005), I find...

This paper uses aggregate-level data, as well as case-studies, to trace out the evolution of some key structural features of the Indian economy, relating both to the agricultural and the informal industrial sector. These aggregate trends are used to infer: (a) the dominant relations of...

This paper derives conditions for two key Keynesian propositions in a simple IS-LM model: (a) the paradox of thrift, and (b) the crowding-in of private investment expenditures by government expenditures. A linear specication of the model is then presented as a special case that can be used for...

Covariate benchmarking is an important part of sensitivity analysis about omitted variable bias and can be used to bound the strength of the unobserved confounder using information and judgments about observed covariates. It is common to carry out formal covariate benchmarking after...