Robert E. Lucas - autobiography

Categoria: Referat Economie

Descriere:

After the war, my father found a job as a welder at a commercial refrigeration company, Lewis Refrigeration. He became a craftsman, then a sales engineer, then sales manager, and eventually president of the company. He had no college degree and no engineering training, and learned the engineering he needed from the people he worked with and from handbooks. I remember many technical and managerial discussions with him, as well as our ongoing political arguments. When I took calculus in high school, he enlisted my help on a refrigeration design problem he was working on-and actually used my calculations! It was my first taste of real applied mathematics, and an exciting one...

ROBERT E. LUCAS, Jr.

me too. My thesis, which used data from U.S. manufacturing to estimate elasticities of substitution between capital and labor, was written under Harberger and Lewis, and was part of a larger project of Harberger's analyzing the effects of various changes in the U.S. tax structure.

There was a terrific collection of students at Chicago in the early 1960s. My closest friends were Glen Cain, Neil Wallace, Sherwin Rosen, and G.S. Maddala, and there were many others who now have international reputations. For many of us, the shock wave of Friedman's libertarian-conservative ideas forced a rethinking of our whole social philosophy. Intense student discussions ranged far beyond technical economics. I tried to hold on to the New Deal politics I had grown up with, and remember voting for Kennedy in 1960. "Nixon? Bob, you couldn't," my sister had said, and she was right (for then!). But however we voted, Friedman's students came away with the sense that we had acquired a powerful apparatus for thinking about economic and political questions.

In 1963 Richard Cyert, the new Dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology (nowCarnegie-Mellon University), offered me a faculty position. I had met Allan Meltzer and Leonard Rapping at my job seminar there, and I knew GSIA would be a stimulating and congenial place for me. GSIA's leading intellectual figure was Herbert Simon. Although Simon was no longer working in economics when I came to Carnegie, he was always ready to talk about economics (or any other area of social or management science) at lunch or coffee. He gave all of us at GSIA the feeling of being in the major leagues, and helped us to outgrow the sense that all the important work was going on at Chicago or Cambridge.

Once my thesis was finished, I began theoretical work on the decisions of business firms to invest in physical capital and in improved technology. Dale Jorgenson had served on my Chicago thesis committee, and his work on investment had stimulated me. I spent a lot of time in my first years at Carnegie Tech learning the mathematics of dynamical systems and optimization over time, and trying to see how these methods could best be applied to economic questions. Economists of my cohort all over the world were engaged in this enterprise in the 1960s, and I remember exciting conferences on this theme at Chicago and Yale, led by Hirofumi Uzawa.

During my years there, Carnegie-Mellon had a remarkable group of economists interested in dynamics and the formation of expectations. Foremost, of course, was John Muth, my colleague in my first three years there. Morton Kamien and Nancy Schwartz had come from Purdue about the time I came from Chicago. Dick Roll, a student of Eugene Fama's at Chicago, brought the ideas of efficient market theory to GSIA. Thomas Sargent came to Carnegie-Mellon from Harvard in the middle of writing his thesis, and I remember the discussions he and Roll had about interest rates (that none of the rest of us could follow). Morris DeGroot taught a course in statistical decision theory that influenced Edward Prescott, and through Ed, me. John Bossons and later Michael Lovell studied direct evidence on expectations. It would be hard to think of a better group of colleagues, given my interests in economic dynamics.

At Carnegie I became involved in two collaborations, both of which bore immediate fruit and also influenced my thinking for years afterward. One of these was a project with Leonard Rapping, my closest friend and colleague at that time, in which we undertook to provide a neoclassical account of the behavior of U.S. wages and employment from 1929 to 1958. The paper was a bolder step into new territory than I would have taken then on my own, and the project never would have been undertaken or completed without Leonard's confidence and his expertise in labor economics.

Edward Prescott had come to GSIA as a doctoral student in the same year I joined the faculty, and we were immediate friends. A few years later, when Ed had become a faculty member at Penn, I enlisted his help on a theoretical project I had begun on the dynamics of an imperfectly competitive industry. That problem defeated us, but in the course of failing to solve it we found ourselves talking and corresponding about everything in economic dynamics. In a couple of years we learned large chunks of modern general equilibrium theory, functional analysis, and probability theory, and wrote a paper, "Investment under Uncertainty," that reformulated John Muth's idea of rational expectations in a useful way . During this brief period my whole point of view of economic dynamics took form (along with Ed's), in a way that has served me well ever since.

David Cass, who came to Carnegie-Mellon in 1971, had earlier aroused my interest in Samuelson's overlapping generations model of a monetary economy. At about the same time, Edmund Phelps convinced me that Rapping's and my model of labor supply needed to be situated in a general equilibrium context. These influences, combined with much that I had learned working with Prescott, came together in my paper, "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money," which was completed in 1970 and published in 1972. The role of this paper, certainly the most influential of my writings, is one of the subjects of my Nobel lecture. In May, 1995, Rao Aiyagari organized a 25th Anniversary Conference for this paper, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This occasion ranks high among the professional pleasures and honors I have received.

In 1974 I returned to Chicago as a faculty member. In 1980 I became the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at Chicago, the position I hold today. Chicago has been a marvellous place for me, as I knew it would be from my student experiences, and I have been stimulated by colleagues and graduate teaching into research on monetary theory, international-trade, fiscal policy, and economic growth: all the basic topics in macroeconomics. But the main features of one's approach to science, like the main features of one's personality more generally, are set early on. For me, the influences of my parents, my undergraduate and graduate years at Chicago, and my years at Carnegie Mellon were critical, so it is these influences I have focused on here.

I have had a rewarding personal life, intertwined with the intellectual life that I have described in these notes. Rita Cohen, also an undergraduate at Chicago, and I were married in New York in August, 1959, just before I began graduate studies at Berkeley. Our son Stephen was born in Chicago in September, 1960. Our son Joseph was born in Pittsburgh in January, 1966. Steve is now a securities trader at the Chemical Bank in New York. Joe is a graduate student in History at Boston University, and his wife Tanya is a resident at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Rita and I were separated in 1982, and divorced several years later.

Since 1982 I have lived with Nancy Stokey, who is now a colleague of mine at Chicago. We have collaborated in papers on growth theory, public finance, and monetary theory. Our monograph, Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics, was published in 1989. Since then, our collaboration has been a domestic one only . We have an apartment on Chicago's north side, and a summer house on Lake Michigan, in Door County, Wisconsin.