Robert E. Lucas

Robert Lucas is one of the outstanding monetary theorists of the past hundred years. Along with Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, James Tobin, and Milton Friedman (his teacher), Lucas revolutionized our understanding of how money interacts with the real economy of production, consumption, and exchange. Lucas’s contributions are both methodological and substantive. Methodologically, he developed dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models to analyze economic decision-makers operating through time in a complex, probabilistic environment. Substantively, he incorporated the quantity theory of money into these models and derived its implications for money growth, inflation, and interest rates in the long run. He also showed the different effects of anticipated and unanticipated changes in the stock of money on economic fluctuations, and helped to demonstrate that there was not a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation (the Phillips curve) that policy-makers could exploit. The twenty-one papers collected in this volume fall primarily into three categories: core monetary theory and public finance, asset pricing, and the real effects of monetary instability. Published between 1972 and 2007, they will inspire students and researchers who want to study the work of a master of economic modeling and to advance economics as a pure and applied science.

In this book the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas collects his writings on economic growth, from his seminal On the Mechanics of Economic Development to his previously unpublished 1997 Kuznets Lectures. The chapters progress from a general theory of how growth could be sustained and why growth rates might differ in different countries, to a model of exceptional growth in certain countries in the twentieth century, to an account of the take-off of growth in the Industrial Revolution, and finally to a prediction about patterns of growth in this new century. The framework in all the chapters is a model with accumulation of both physical and human capital, with emphasis on the external benefits of human capital through diffusion of new knowledge or on-the-job learning, often stimulated by trade. The Kuznets Lectures consider the interaction of human capital growth and the demographic transition in the early stages of industrialization. In the final chapter, Lucas uses a diffusion model to illustrate the possibility that the vast intersociety income inequality created in the course of the Industrial Revolution may have already reached its peak, and that income differences will decline in this century.

Develops the basic methods of recursive analysis, covers stochastic dynamic programming, and presents two fundamental theorems of welfare economics

In the past decade macroeconomic theory has undergone a remarkable transformation. At the forefront has been the "rational expectations revolution," and this school's most brilliant exponent is Robert E. Lucas. In this elegant and relatively non-technical survey, Lucas reviews the nature and consequences of recent developments in monetary and business cycle theory. He discusses the usefulness of alternative models in determining the effects of economic policy on consumption streams and individual welfare. Drawing on a specific model of aggregate activity which represents the current frontier in business cycle research, he then examines the contemporary theory of unemployment. Finally and most controversially, he explores the role of monetary disturbances.

An academic colleague has called Lucas "the dominant figure in American macroeconomics." And another refers to this group of 14 essays, nearly all of which were first published during the 1970s, as the most influential contribution to macroeconomics in that decade.