ABSTRACT

The most easily identifiable heritage of Marshall, in the ‘new’ Cambridge School of Economics, is the short period. The short period of Keynes, Kahn and Joan Robinson has a peculiar meaning, whose origin can be traced back to the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those years saw the transition from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and the transformation of the Marshallian-Pigouvian apparatus that culminated in The Economics of Imperfect Competition. This paper is concerned with three points in particular. The first is the importance of Kahn’s work in providing the link between the short-period determination of price and quantity of a single commodity and the short-period theory of the level of prices and output in aggregate. The second is a comparison between Kahn’s fellowship dissertation, The Economics of the Short Period, and Robinson’s The Economics of Imperfect Competition, with a view to pointing out their common ground. The third point is the peculiarity of Joan Robinson’s position as regards the importance of short period in economic analysis.