Heterodox Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. (September 15, 1937 – May 15, 2023) was an American economist at the University of Chicago.

Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics,[1] he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1995 "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy".

[8] His dissertation, Substitution Between Labor and Capital in U.S. Manufacturing: 1929–1958, was written under the supervision of H. Gregg Lewis and Dale Jorgenson.

The citation noted that the prize was "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy".

Lucas (1972) incorporated the idea of rational expectations into a dynamic macroeconomic models.

[18] He also provided sound theoretical foundations to Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps's view of the long-run neutrality of money, and provided an explanation for the then observed correlation between output and inflation, depicted by the Phillips curve, while illustrating that the existence of this empirical relationship did not yield a possibility of a policy trade off.

[27] Lucas married an undergraduate classmate from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Rita Cohen.