Gregor Semieniuk

A Statistical Equilibrium Approach to the Distribution of Profit Rates

Following the work of Farjoun and Machover (1983) who propose a probabilistic approach to classical political economy, we study the empirical distribution of the rate of profit for previously unexamined firm level data. We detail the theoretical rationale of the principle of maximum entropy which Farjoun and Machover use to predict a stationary profit rate distribution. Then we examine their hypothesis of gamma distributed profit rates for over 24,000 publicly listed North American firms from 1962-2014 and find strong evidence for the organization of the distribution into a double exponential, or Laplace like distribution both at the economy wide and one and two digit SIC industry levels. In addition, we find that the otherwise stationary profit rate distributions exhibit a structural change following the 1980s as they display a surge in the fraction of firms earning negative profits. We offer an alternative justification for the Laplace distribution based on maximum entropy reasoning and show that this distribution can be surprisingly explained by a single constraint on the absolute deviation of profit rates from the mean.

Reducing Economic Imbalances in the Euro Area: Some Remarks on the Current Stability Programs, 2011–14

This paper evaluates whether the 2011 national stability programs (SPs) of the euro area countries are instrumental in achieving economic stability in the European Monetary Union (EMU). In particular, we analyze how the SPs address the double challenge of public deficits and external imbalances. Our analysis rests, first, on the accounting identities of the public, private, and foreign financial balances; and second, on the consideration of all SPs at once rather than separately. We find that conclusions are optimistic regarding GDP growth and fiscal consolidation, while current account rebalancing is neglected. The current SPs reach these conclusions by assuming strong global export markets, entrenched current account imbalances within the EMU as well as the deterioration of private financial balances in the current account deficit countries. By means of our simulations we conclude, on the one hand, that the failure of favorable global macroeconomic developments to materialize may lead to the opposite of the desired stability by exacerbating imbalances in the euro area. On the other hand, given symmetric efforts at rebalancing, the simulation suggests that for surplus countries that reduce their current account, a more expansionary fiscal policy will likely be required to maintain growth rates.

Piketty’s Elasticity of Substitution: A Critique

ABSTRACT This article examines Thomas Piketty’s explanation of a falling wage share. Piketty explains rising income inequality between labor and capital as a result of one parameter of a production function: an elasticity of substitution, σ, between labor and capital greater than one. This article reviews Piketty’s elasticity argument, which relies on a non-standard definition of capital. In light of the theory of land rent, it discusses why the non-standard capital definition is a measure of wealth, not capital and is problematic for estimating elasticities. It then presents simple long-run estimates of σ in constant elasticity of substitution functions for Piketty’s data as well as for a subset of his capital measure that comes closer to the standard definition of productive capital. The estimation results cast doubt on Piketty’s hypothesis that σ is greater than one.

Nothing learned from the crisis? Some remarks on the Stability Programmes 2011-2014 of the Euro area governments

We analyse the newly updated Stability Programmes of the Euro area governments by applying the simple accounting identity by which the financial balances of the government, the private sector and the foreign sector always sum to zero. While the focus of the old Stability and Growth Pact was solely on the government balance, the current euro crisis has shown that this narrow focus was wrong and that macroeconomic stability within the monetary union requires reducing imbalances between all three sectors of individual member states. While the need for overcoming these imbalances is now increasingly recognised by economists and policymakers, we argue that the projections for achieving stability in the current Stability Programmes are very likely too optimistic. We show that, individually, the Stability Programmes rely on optimistic assumptions about GDP growth; collectively, they require an improvement of the Euro areas current account with the rest of the world, the continuation of significant current account imbalances within the Euro area, and a steep drop of private balances in some countries. Based on some simple counterfactual simulations, we conclude that a symmetric effort at rebalancing current accounts would most likely require a slowdown of fiscal consolidation (in the current account surplus countries) but would be required to successfully address the euro areas macroeconomic challenges and thereby not only allow for consolidation in the medium term but also lead to the desired stability.

Fossil Energy in Economic Growth: A Study of the Energy Direction of Technical Change, 1950-2012

Climate change mitigation challenges national economies to increase productivity while reducing fossil energy consumption. Fossil energy-saving technical change has been as- sumed to accomplish this, yet empirical evidence is scarce. This paper investigates the long-run relationship between the rate and direction of technical change with respect to fossil energy and labor in the world economy. Growth rates of labor productivity and the fossil energy-labor ratio are examined for more than 95% of world output be- tween 1950 and 2012. The average elasticity of the energy-labor ratio with respect to labor productivity is close to one, implying highly energy-using technical change, but no trade-o between factor productivity growth rates. This stylized fact suggests the importance of a cheap, abundant energy supply for robust global growth, and a more important role for renewable energy. Integrated assessment models do not incorporate this restriction which may result in poorly speci ed baseline scenarios.

A Mixture Model for Filtering Firms' Profit Rates

Existing methods for sample selection from noisy profit rate data in the industrial organization field of economics tend to be conditional on a covariate’s value that risks discarding valuable information. We condition sample selection on the profit rate data’s structure instead by means of a Bayesian mixture model. In a two component (signal and noise) mixture that reflects the prior belief of noisy data, each firm profit rate observation is assigned an indicator latent variable. Gibbs sampling determines the latent variables’ posterior densities, sorting profit rate observations to the signal or noise component. We apply two model specifications to empirical profit rate cross sections, one with a Normal and one with a Laplace signal component. We find the Laplace specification to have a superior fit based on the Bayes factor and the profit rate sample to be time stationary Laplace distributed, corroborating earlier estimates of cross section distributions. Our model retains 97%, as opposed to as little as 20%, of the raw data in a previous application