19.95 Robert E. Lucas Jr.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1995 Robert E. Lucas Jr. "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy"Lucas (1976) challenged the foundations of macroeconomic theory (previously dominated by the Keynesian economics approach), arguing that a macroeconomic model should be built as an aggregated version of microeconomic models (while noting that aggregation in the theoretical sense may not be possible within a given model). 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. This led to the development of new classical macroeconomics and the drive towards microeconomic foundations for macroeconomic theory.


(From Wikipedia)
He received his B.A. in History in 1959 and Ph.D. in Economics in 1964, both from the University of Chicago. Lucas studied 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.[2] Following graduation, Lucas taught at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (nowTepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University until 1975, when he returned to the University of Chicago.[3]

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.[4] He has lived with Nancy Stokey. They have collaborated in papers on growth theory, public finance, and monetary theory.