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Is There A Tendency For The Rate Of Profit To Fall? Econometric Evidence For The U.S. Economy, 1948-2007, Deepankar Basu, Panayiotis T. Manolakos

Economics Department Working Paper Series

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 of the behaviour of the rate of profit. In this paper, we attempt to fill this lacuna in two ways. First, we investigate the time series properties of the profit rate series. The evidence suggests that the rate of profit behaves like a random walk and exhibits "long waves" interestingly correlated with …