Robert Lucas Jr. is a consultant in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Since 1974 he has been the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College at the University of Chicago. In 1995 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy.”
Lucas received his B.A. in history in 1959 and Ph.D. in economics in 1964, both from the University of Chicago. He 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. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1976) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1981), a Guggenheim Fellow (1981–82), as well as president of the Econometric Society (1997) and the American Economic Association (2002).
Since the 1970s, Lucas’s work has had a great influence on the field of economics and has challenged the foundations of macroeconomic theory. His so-called Lucas critique of economic policymaking maintains that relationships that appear to hold in the economy, such as an apparent relationship between inflation and unemployment, could change in response to changes in economic policy. This idea led to the development of New Keynesian economics.
Well known for his investigations into the implications of the assumption of rational expectations, Lucas’s long and distinguished career includes holding editorial positions with esteemed journals such as the Journal of Economic Theory (associate editor, 1972–78), the Journal of Monetary Economics (associate editor, 1977–81), the Journal of Political Economy (editor, 1988–2002), and the Review of Economic Dynamics (editor, 2002–8).
In 1989 he coauthored with Nancy Stokey and Edward Prescott a book entitled Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics (Harvard University Press). He is the author of Lectures on Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2002), a collection of his writings.
Recent Work/Updates
June 2011 - The Region
Additional Files [pdf]
May 2011 - Economic Policy Papers
Additional Files [pdf]
May 2004 - The Region
May 2004 - Annual Reports 2003
December 2001 - The Region
January 2001 - Working Paper 609
Published In: American Economic Review
(Vol. 91, No. 2, May 2001, pp. 219-225)
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