Even when only labor is scarce, the validity of a labor theory of value depends on reducing all labor to a homogeneous equivalent. The various implicit or explicit efforts of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx to do so are shown to fail on more counts than previously recognized. The labor theory is also shown to fail when laborers are not indifferent among alternative occupations.

Journal Article The Free Rider Problem and a Social Custom Model of Trade Union Membership Get access Alison L. Booth Alison L. Booth The City University, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 100, Issue 1, February 1985, Pages 253–261, https://doi.org/10.2307/1885744 Published: 01 February 1985

Olivier J. Blanchard, Eric S. Maskin, Lawrence H. Summers; Manifesto, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 100, Issue 1, 1 February 1985, Pages iii,

This paper uses data from the annual Work Experience Survey to construct a new unemployment series based on respondents' recollection of unemployment over the previous year. It is argued that the ratio of this new series to the official series computed from the monthly Current Population Survey provides an index of the “salience” or painfulness of unemployment. Over the past two decades this ratio has declined secularly. About 30 percent of this decrease is due to shifts in the composition of unemployment toward demographic groups with low ratios of remembered to currently reported unemployment. The remainder is due to a secular decline in salience for younger and older people.

A model is developed to illustrate Hyman Minsky's financial crisis theories. A key assumption is that the level of wealth in the economy is determined mac-roeconomically, with the value of firms' assets responding to the state of confidence as reflected by discounted quasi rents on capital. The second assumption is that there is high substitutability between liabilities of firms and money in the public's portfolio. A downward shift in anticipated profits leads wealth to contract and the public to shift portfolio preferences toward money. Interest rates rise, leading to further dampening of expected profits, and a debt-deflation crisis can occur.

This paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects. The individual loss to agents with inertial price-wage behavior is second-order in terms of the parameter describing the shock, while the effect on real economic variables is first-order. Thus, significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses.

This paper investigates oil depletion and trade when monopolistic oil producers also exercise monopoly power in the capital market. A two-period model views collusively organized oil producers with an initial trade surplus and a subsequent deficit. When monopoly power in the capital market is applied to the disadvantage of borrowers, less oil is initially made available to oil importers than if the interest rate had been competitively determined. This depletion bias, however, is reversed if, because of incentives for capital accumulation, it is to the advantage of the oil producers to subsidize lending to the oil importers. In either case the bias in oil depletion due to monopolistic recycling of oil revenue is greater, the more vulnerable are oil importers' incomes to a curtailment of oil supplies.