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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Lucy Brillant
Lucy Brillant*
Affiliation:
lucy.brillant@u-bourgogne.fr. LEDi, University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and PHARE, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 393 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees of the JHET. This paper was presented on several occasions: at the Economic Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) in May 2015 (Roma, Italy); at the 1st History of Economics Summer School in Latin America (HESSLA) held at Bogota (Colombia) in April 2015, and granted by HESSLA; and at the international conference organized by the History of Economic Society in 2016, held at Michigan State University. I thank Professor Don Mattew and Mauro Boianovsky, who discussed my paper at Michigan State University for the first and at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy) for the second. This paper was also presented at the seminar for PhD students of PHARE in Paris on January 2015. My warm thanks go to Jérôme de Boyer des Roches and Sylvie Diatkine for their time and wise advice. I am grateful to Victor Bianchini, Céline Bouillot, Marie Daou, Pierre-Hernan Rojas, and Thomas Ruellou, whose interesting discussions helped and encouraged me at different stages of this paper.

References

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