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During recent years, several empirical studies have found that deviations from labour values to market prices are quite small. However, most of these articles do not offer a detailed reason for this result. In this paper two theoretical justifications of the labour theory of value are brought together with some data concerning labour values, prices of production and market prices, on the basis of German input-output tables from 2000 and 2004. In addition, the statistical characteristics of profit rates are analysed. Both of the theoretical arguments are much in line with the empirical observations, because there is only a slight transformation tendency and at the same time profit rates and capital intensity are negatively correlated. Moreover, during the period under observation the German economy seems to be in a state of statistical equilibrium.

In response to corporate scandals in 2001 and 2002, major U.S. stock exchanges issued new board requirements to enhance board oversight. We find a significant decrease in CEO compensation for firms that were more affected by these requirements, compared with firms that were less affected, taking into account unobservable firm effects, time-varying industry effects, size, and performance. The decrease in compensation is particularly pronounced in the subset of affected firms with no outside blockholder on the board and in affected firms with low concentration of institutional investors. Our results suggest that the new board requirements affected CEO compensation decisions.

Domiciliary carers are paid care workers who travel to the homes of older people to assist with personal routines. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the delivery of domiciliary care has been organised according to market principles and portrayed as the ideal type of formal care; offering cost savings to local authorities and independence for older people. Crucially, the work of the former 'home help' is transformed as domiciliary carers are now subject to the imperative of private, competitive accumulation which necessitates a constant search for increases in labour productivity. Drawing on qualitative data from domiciliary carers, managers and stakeholders, this article highlights the commodification of caring labour and reveals the constraints, contradictions and challenges of paid care work. Labour Process Theory offers a means of understanding the political economy of care work and important distinctions in terms of the formal and informal domiciliary care labour process.

We give a simple and direct proof of necessary and sufficient conditions to have constant equilibrium prices in a simple Sraffa's production model. We make some remarks on the linearity of the relation between profit rate and wage rate.

Employment at a multinational enterprise (MNE) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE enters a foreign location, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior studies rarely found wages to affect MNE employment. Our integrated approach documents salient labor substitution for German manufacturing MNEs and removes bias. In Central and Eastern Europe, most employment responds at the extensive margin, while in Western Europe the extensive margin accounts for around two-thirds of employment shifts. At distant locations, MNEs respond to wages only at the extensive margin.

It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the 'industrious' revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two 'industrious' revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

It has long been accepted that Marx was a follower of the labour theory of value. This position has recently been challenged by Harvey. This paper shows that the essential basis of Marx's value theory remained labour and that it did not differ substantially from that of Ricardo. It also references data showing the empirical validity of the theory and presents example data from the UK 1998 input output table showing how closely monetary output shadows labour content.

Empirical estimates derived in line with the Marxist framework are essential to fully address several topics, from the dynamics of profit and exploitation rates to unequal exchange, crisis and strategies. Edward Ochoa presented and implemented a pioneering practical proposal to perform such strand of calculations from widely available input–output data. That leveraged method has become widespread in empirical studies. This article focuses on a controversial aspect of such a proposal: the reduction of skilled or complex to simple unskilled labour. After a critical dialogue from a theoretical point of view, this article provides estimate comparisons based on available data for the period 1995 to 2009, discusses alternative proposals and stresses their virtues and caveats, pointing to the strength of methods that don’t fully rely on wage indexes and to future paths of research needed.

Care robots have the potential to address the challenge of aging societies, such as labor shortages or the aging workforce. While previous studies have focused mainly on the productivity or workability of care robots, there has been an increasing need to understand the social value of care robots. This study attempted to identify the social values of care robots by conducting focus group interviews (FGIs) with twenty-four care recipients and caregivers and by using analytic hierarchy processes (AHPs) with thirteen individuals with expertise in the care service and care robot industries. Our results show that the labor- and health-related benefits, the technology innovation, and the provision of essential care work have the highest importance among the criteria of care robots’ social values. The criteria that receive lowest priority are cost, the autonomy and needs of the care recipients, and the organizational innovation. Our study suggests that along with the private benefits and costs of care robots, their social values also need to be considered to improve the quality of care and to unlock the potential of the care robot industries.

In the literature on global commodity chains, industrial upgrading describes the process whereby firms shift to more secure or more profitable niches within or between industries through organizational learning facilitated by networks. While the framework of upgrading identifies key dynamics of competition between capitals, it nonetheless sidelines inquiry into how such imperatives condition and are conditioned by labor. To address this conceptual weakness, I argue that studies of the restructuring of production networks can be enriched through a feminist analysis of value. In particular, the efforts of firms to reposition themselves in networks should be considered in light of struggles to rework the basis of labor's value to capital, a process of reproducing and recombining interlocking social differences into novel combinations of exploitable workers. I explore this process through an in-depth case study of a large garment firm in the Dominican Republic, in which upgrading involved the reworking of skilled and unskilled work, animated by gendered practices and norms, that led to the masculinization of skilled sewing and the feminization of new service engineering functions.