Über die Natur und das Wesen des Geldes: Johann Heinrich von Thünens unveröffentlichter Beitrag zur Geldtheorie
The economic works of Johann Heinrich von Thunen include 1,000 unpublished pages of drafts and notes on the basis of which he prepared the second volume of his famous 'Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy'. Thunen wrote his texts in the so-called Deutsche Kanzleischrift, a script which can be read today only by specialised historians, rarely by economists. In a first part of a research project of the Thunen-Gesellschaft e.V. 300 pages were transliterated, from which the first 60 pages were reviewed until October 2009. It becomes obvious that Thunen's work is much more far-reaching than the contributions published by himself or edited by Schumacher in 1863 and 1875 show. Its bulk was not made accessible until today. This can be easily demonstrated by the content of these first 60 pages, especially those treating monetary questions and preparing Thunen's theory of capital and interest. Thunen starts his analysis with a description of the diminishing return of money keeping in an enterprise. He considers both the exchange and the stock function of money. He describes the pros and cons of the creation of paper money as a substitute for coins. Thunen is the first economist who develops an extended quantity theory of money by introducing the velocity of money transactions and formulating the correct algebraic formula. He anticipates the famous Newcomb-Fisher equation but with one difference: in Thunen's opinion the product of velocity and quantity of money primarily determines the value of circulating capital goods and assets, an argument which has to be understood with the contemporary rural economic conditions in mind. He analyses the liquidity effect of positive exogenous money shocks. By describing the adaptation processes in the case of differences between the monetary market interest rate and the real rate of return on capital goods, Thunen presents important mechanisms of Knut Wicksell's 'Interest and Prices', which were published 75 years later and still inspire the monetary economists today. In accordance with Henry Thornton, he adequately describes the consequences of liquidity preference in the case of uncertain economic situations. In our opinion Thunen's 1823 contribution is of the same quality as the contributions of the leading monetary theorists in the early 19th century, David Ricardo and Henry Thornton. With respect to the further theoretic development in the nineteenth and twentieth century and from the perspective of modern monetary theory, Thunen's drafts are an unexpected discovery and of particular interest in the current financial and economic crisis. The paper concludes with a preliminary assessment of Thunen's text in the context of the sec-ond volume of the 'Isolated State', which was published in 1850 and which contains Thunen's 'Theory of Capital and Interest'.
The Two-Sector Von Thünen Original Marginal Productivity Model of Capital; and Beyond
This article considers a two-sector model of scalar capital from the perspectives of smoothly differentiable neoclassical technologies and also non-differentiable technologies based on discrete alternative Leontief-Sraffa techniques. The analysis shows that in these Thunen-like scenarios without joint production the real wage and the interest rate are necessarily in an inverse Ricardian tradeoff. This complements the findings of Samuelson and Etula (2006 , Japan and the World Economy, 18, pp. 331-356) and completes the analysis of single homogeneous scalar capital. Copyright © 2008 The Author; Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Complexity, Network-Decisions And Alternative Risk Premia: Some New Theories Of Structural Change And Portfolio Decisions.
Structural Change is the basis for many decisions such as government fiscal and monetary policies, government interventions, corporate-expenditure decisions, corporate strategic decisions, portfolio management decisions in finance; household allocation decisions, etc.. Structural change in industries and national economies is increasingly more difficult to detect partly because of the growth and dominance of Complex Systems and “Networks” in modern industries and economies – such Networks and Complex Systems include GVCs (global value chains), retail store networks; franchising networks; internet networks; services networks; credit-chains in industries; online social networks; etc.. The relationship between Complexity and Structural Change is well established in the physics, applied math and economic dynamics literatures. Traditional definitions and modeling of structural change have erroneously focused on changes in labor, technological progress, market share, and or capital – which are grossly inadequate in the new economy and post- global financial crisis (as confirmed by changes in the global retailing and housing industries and other industries). Also the modeling of structural change seems to be constrained by the availability of data, and often omits the relationship between structural change on one hand, and globalization, financial stability and international financial contagion. This article: i) introduces the Operations Strategy Model of structural change, explains how it differs from the Lewis Model of Structural Change; and explains the often omitted relationship between operations strategy (of companies and government agencies) and structural change; ii) introduces other new Complexity-based models/theories of Structural Change in industries; iii) reviews the relationships among Operations Research, Complexity and Structural Change; iv) explains the symbiotic relationship between structural change on one hand, and economic growth, financial stability, financial contagion and globalization; v) discusses the significant gap between academic research and practice and explains some issues and factors that should be considered in the development and testing of structural change models; vi) explains how alternative risk premia can be generated from new models of Structural Change.