Robert Lucas Jr.

Robert Lucas Jr. married Rita Cohen, an undergraduate student at Chicago, in August 1959, and separated from her in 1982. He divorced her in 1988. He has two sons from the marriage named Stephen and Joseph.

In 1982 he married Nancy Stokey and collaborated with her in writing various papers on public finance, growth and monetary theories.

Robert Lucas Jr. was born Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. in Yakima, Washington, US on September 15, 1937.

He is the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton. He has a younger sister named Jenepher and two younger brothers named Peter and Daniel.

His parents had a small restaurant named ‘The Lucas Ice Creamery’ in Yakima which had to be shutdown due to the economic recession during 1937 and 1938.

During the Second World War his parents moved to Seattle where he father found work as a welder in a commercial refrigeration company and his mother went back to being a fashion artist.

He joined the ‘Seattle Public Schools’ and graduated from the ‘Roosevelt High School’ in 1955.

Robert Lucas Jr. taught at the ‘Graduate School of Industrial Administration, now called the ‘Tepper School of Business’ at the Carnegie Mellon University from 1963 to 1975.

In 1972 he developed a model which had the expectations of future prices and quantities incorporated into it. He also provided an explanation for the relationship between output and inflation which had been depicted by the ‘Philips curve’ earlier.

He returned to the ‘University of Chicago’ in 1975 as a professor of economics.

In 1976 he developed the ‘Lucas critique’ which should be applied to economic policy making. The critique challenged the foundations of macroeconomic theory and explained the relationship between inflation and unemployment.

In 1980 he was made a ‘John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Economics’.

Robert Lucas Jr. published a collection of his research work titled ‘Studies in Business-Cycle Theory’ in 1981.

In 1987 he published an overview of the ‘economic theory’ in his book named ‘Models of Business’.

He also edited and co-edited several journals on economics and published his collection of writings the book ‘Lectures on Economic Growth’ in 2001.