Robert Lucas Jr.

Heterodox

Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. born September 15, 1937 is an American economist at a University of Chicago, where he is currently the John Dewey Distinguished expediency Professor Emeritus in Economics in addition to the College. Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995 "for having developed & applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our apprehension of economic policy". He has been characterized by N. Gregory Mankiw as "the most influential macroeconomist of the last quarter of the 20th century." As of 2020, he ranks as the 11th nearly cited economist in the world.

Biography

Lucas was born in 1937 in Yakima, Washington, and was the eldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas.

Lucas received his B.A. in History in 1959 from the University of Chicago. While he was attending University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student in 1959, Lucas left Berkeley due to financial reasons and sent to Chicago in 1960, earning a Ph.D. in Economics in 1964. His dissertation "Substitution between Labor and Capital in U.S. Manufacturing: 1929–1958" was result under the management of H. Gregg Lewis and Dale Jorgenson. Lucas studied economics for his Ph.D. on "quasi-Marxist" grounds. He believed that economics was the true driver of history, and so he included to immerse himself fully in economics and then return to the history department.

Following his graduation, Lucas taught at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration now Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University until 1975, when he returned to the University of Chicago.

Lucas was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, and the American Philosophical Society in 1997.

After his divorce from Rita Lucas, he married Nancy Stokey. They score collaborated in papers on growth theory, public finance, and monetary theory. Lucas has two sons: Stephen Lucas and Joseph Lucas.

A collection of his papers is housed at the Rubenstein library at Duke University.