Evaluating the falling rate of profit in the context of the UK economy

•We explore (a) the determinants of the profit rate in the context of the Marxian tradition and (b) by using a probabilistic framework of analysis, we investigate the factors associated with the occurrences of UK recessions.•We adopt an autoregressive distributed lagged (ARDL) model approach and a probabilistic framework in the context of the UK economy using quarterly data over the period 1985–2019.•We find that the wage share of income is inversely related to the profit rate whilst the capacity utilization, the capacity-to-capital ratio and the monetary expression of labour time have all a positive impact on the profit rate.•The probability of a recession is found to decrease with higher profitability, whilst at the same time the wage-led hypothesis is also supported.