Review of Radical Political Economics

This article presents and econometrically tests three models of discrimination and competition. The analysis facilitates a comparison of Marxist, segmentation, and neoclassical explanations of inter-industry wage differentials and the distribution of employment by race and gender. Our results (1) demonstrate race and gender rationing of manufacturing employment in 1970, and (2) lend support to the notion that both competition between capitals and employment discrimination are historically important determinants of gender and racial earnings inequality.

Recent work has drawn attention to the connection between technical change and the labor market. Reasonable assumptions concerning both the reality of positive capital accumulation and the effect of technical change on wage rates reveal the ubiquitous possibility of viable technical changes that raise the composition of capital and lower the rate of profit. A complete non-steady-state growth model including both optimal technical change and labor-market dynamics is described; the model provides a test of the empirical likelihood of an accumulation path with a rising profit share and falling profit rate. A general perspective on the existence and role of critical tendencies in capitalist economic growth is presented.

This paper distinguishes between three uses of the concept of rent seeking. the tautologous, the contextual, and the unselfconscious. It argues in favor of contextual use and shows that that requires explicit discussion of normative questions involving redistribution and the proper role of the state. The paper also considers issues raised for rent seeking theory by transaction costs and the contested exchange model.

This paper investigates causes of the dramatic increase in the wage-productivity gap—the divergence between the growth rates of aggregate productivity and real wages - in the post-1981 period. Using a two-step estimation procedure which incorporates three-digit industry wage regression coefficients into an aggregate wage growth identity equation, it finds that employment decline within unionized industries explains 18% of the post-1981 increase in the gap and that declining union ability to raise wages may explain as much as another 25%. Imports, on the other hand, do not appear to explain the gap independently of employment effects.