Published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, December 1997 THE RATE OF PROFIT AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM According to Marxian theory, the performance of capitalist economies depends above all else on the rate of profit. When the rate of profit is high, capitalism is relatively prosperous: business investment is high, unemployment is relatively low, and the living standards of worke...

The 2007 financial crisis has reignited the discussion on crises, their origin and possible remedies. At present the most influential thesis on the left sees the crisis as caused by underconsumption and recommends Keynesian policies as a solution. This paper argues that we should understand the crisis from the perspective of Karl Marx’s “law of the tendential fall in the average rate of profit”...

Area Editor: John H. Roberts Despite conventional wisdom that firm profits decrease with competitive entry, the empirical literaturefinds a number of situationswhere the entry of an equivalent-quality competitor into amarket led to higher profits for the incumbents. Our paper uses a standard linear Hotelling (1929)market to study how location choices affect the possibility that profits increase...

INTRODUCTION Residents of low-income communities often purchase sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) at small, neighborhood "corner" stores. Lowering water prices and increasing SSB prices are potentially complementary public health strategies to promote more healthful beverage purchasing patterns in these stores. Sustainability, however, depends on financial feasibility. Because in-store pricing e...

In many production firms it is common practice to financially reward managers for firm performance improvement. The use of financial incentives for improvement has been widely researched in several analytical and empirical studies. Literature has also addressed the strategic effect of incentives, in particular what the effect of certain incentive structures would be on the behavior of a firm's ...

This paper presents results from a survey aimed at analyzing farmers willingness to invest in agroforestry near the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in the state of Campeche in Southeastern Mexico. One hundred seventy-five farmers were interviewed from January through March of 1998. The survey included questions pertaining to levels of human capital investment made by individual farmers. The objectiv...

This paper analyses how different management schemes influence the exploitation and economics of a wildlife population--the moose (Alces alces)--that is both a value (harvesting income) and a pest (forestry damage). Two regimes are explored; the unified management scheme where the wildlife manager aims to find harvesting quotas that maximise the overall benefit of the moose population, and the ...

It is well documented that losses are less persistent than profits and that stock prices anticipate the lower persistence of losses. Yet the underlying explanation for these results is unclear. One explanation lies in the abandonment option, whereby firms with losses are more likely to curtail operations (e.g., Hayn 1995). Another explanation involves timely loss recognition stemming from conse...

A. Addendum to Lemma 1: There are two cases depending on whether one of the firms dominates the market. The case where no firm dominates the market is described in Lemma 1. The following table states the equilibrium prices and profits when one of the firms dominates the market. We describe the equilibrium only when Firm 1 dominates the market for (T, T),(CU, CU) and (CM, CM) as the results are ...

In 2008 security forces in Colombia found that one of the companies hired to repair electric transmission towers from guerrilla attacks had hired guerrilla members to demolish towers in their contracted area of service. As a result, their business boomed as they were called often to repair electric towers. We model this problem as a game between contractors and the power transmission company, w...