HICKS’S THEORY OF THE SHORT-TERM RATE OF INTEREST AND THORNTON’S AND HAWTREY’S INFLUENCES

John Richard Hicks proposed an endogenous theory of money from the 1960s until his final book, A Market Theory of Money (1989). He developed a theory of credit and a theory of short-term rates of interest that had been neglected in his earlier writings such as “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’” (1937). In that early article, Hicks concentrated on the market for cash balances and the motives for the demand for money, while leaving aside the money market and the clearing function of banks. In the 1960s, Hicks was largely inspired by Henry Thornton (1802) and Ralph George Hawtrey (1913, 1919). The originality of this paper is to interpret the short-term rates as the price of liquidity and to examine Hicks’s fight against restrictive monetary policies in the 1960s to the 1970s in Britain.

SUPPLY CHAIN MODELED AS A METABOLIC PATHWAY

A new model of economic production process is proposed (in the form of a set of ODEs) based on an idea that nonconsumable factors of production facilitate the conversion of inputs to output in much the same catalytic way as do enzymes in living cells when transforming substrates into different chemical compounds. The output of a converging, multi-resource, single-product supply chain network is shown to depend on the minimum of its inputs in the form of the Leontief--Liebig production function, providing the validity of the clearing function approximation. In turn use of the clearing function is legitimate when the machine processing time is much shorter than the machine loading time.