R.F. Kahn

Kahn made contributions which secured him a prominent place in the history of economics in three areas: imperfect competition, the theory of employment and monetary and international economics. He was among the inventors of the ‘kinked demand curve’, having introduced ‘conjectures’ into demand curves, in the form of elasticity values, for analysis of price and quantity produced in oligopolistic markets. He was a major protagonist in the Keynesian Revolution, his most famous contribution being undoubtedly the ‘multiplier’ . But Kahn contributed also to the approach taken by Keynes, by extending the Marshallian supply and demand apparatus from the analysis of one single market to the economy as a whole. His approach to the liquidity preference theory is perhaps more radical than Keynes’s. To the end of his life, Kahn dedicated his efforts as a theoretical economist, academic and member of the House of Lords to demolishing the ‘mystique’ of monetarism and building an alternative institutional framework on ‘Keynesian’ foundations for the domestic and international policy.