Ecological Macroeconomist
Oriol Vallès Codina
Senior Research Associate · Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
I work at the intersection of ecological macroeconomics, classical political economy, and the history of economic thought. My research develops formal frameworks — thermodynamic, dynamical, and network-theoretic — for understanding value, accumulation, and ecological limits in capitalist economies.
I use dynamical systems, input-output analysis, networks, and statistical inference to address foundational questions about growth, distribution, and ecological crisis — questions first raised by the classical economists of the nineteenth century and still unresolved.
Research Questions
- Can classical political economy provide a genuine thermodynamic conservation law? How does the labour theory of value deliver both a first-law analogue (the MELT conservation identity) and a second-law analogue (labour as irreversible metabolic work)?
- How do multi-sector economies stabilise or destabilise in the face of demand and supply shocks — and what policies can simultaneously reduce economic volatility and environmental impact?
- What is the correct structural account of economic crisis? Can Sraffian production theory be unified with autocatalytic set theory to explain why crises are discontinuous — phase transitions rather than smooth departures from equilibrium?
- What are the thermodynamic limits of capitalist accumulation? How do the exhaustion of living labour (rising organic composition) and the exhaustion of natural entropy sinks (ecological limits) jointly define the secular entropy maximum?
Work in Progress
Input-output network of Mexico (800+ sectors, INEGI). Star-shaped hierarchy with few core industrial hubs.
Conservative multi-sector dynamics under constant technology. Classical oscillations in prices and quantities.
ecoclassical.github.io