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Robert Emerson Lucas, Jr. (born September 15, 1937, Yakima, Washington) is an American economist at the University of Chicago. He was named among the 10 best economists, and received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1995. He is married to economist Nancy Stokey.

He 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.

One of the most influential economists since the 1970s, he changed the foundations of macroeconomic theory (previously dominated by the Keynesian economics approach), arguing that a macroeconomic model should be built in analogy with microeconomic models. He is well known for his investigations into the implications of the assumption of rational expectations. He developed the "Lucas critique" of economic policymaking, which holds 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. He also developed the Lucas-Islands model, which suggests that people are tricked by unsystematic parts of monetary policy, the Lucas-Uzawa model (with Hirofumi Uzawa) of human capital accumulation, and stated the "Lucas paradox" why not more capital is flowing from developed countries to developing countries.

His ex-wife, Rita Lucas, upon their divorce in 1988, had a clause placed in their divorce settlement that she would receive half of any Nobel Prize won by Lucas in the next seven years. When Lucas did win the Nobel Prize in 1995 (falling just within the time limit), she was awarded half of the prize money.

He did Economics for his PhD on "quasi-Marxist" grounds. He believed that economics was the true driver of history, and so he planned to fully immerse himself in economics and then migrate back to the history department.

Bibliography

Lucas, Robert (1972). "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money". Journal of Economic Theory 4 103–124.
Lucas, Robert (1976). "Econometric Policy Evaluation: A Critique". Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 1 19–46.
Lucas, Robert (1988). "On the Mechanics of Economic Development". Journal of Monetary Economics 22 3–42.
Lucas, Robert (1990). "Why Doesn't Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries". American Economic Review 80 92–96.
Lucas, Robert (1981). Studies in Business-Cycle Theory. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-62044-8.
Lucas, Robert (1995) - MONETARY NEUTRALITY Prize Lecture - 1995 Nobel Prize in economics , December 7, 1995
Stokey, Nancy; Robert Lucas; and Edward Prescott (1989), Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics. Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674750969.