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Dudley Luckett

Dudley Luckett

Dudley Gilmore Luckett was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Iowa State University, where he taught both Money & Banking and the History of Economic Thought from 1957 until his retirement in 1995.

Born on September 10, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Luther J. and Emily A. Luckett, he was raised in Sedalia, Missouri, with his older brother Luther J. “Jim” Luckett, who died on Christmas Eve, 1944, while serving in the U.S. Army in France.

Dudley served as an intelligence clerk in the U.S. occupation forces in Tokyo, Japan. He later earned BA and MA degrees at the University of Missouri where he met his future wife, Marjorie Ann Manley of Springfield, Missouri. In 1958, he received the PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation on the term structure of interest rates. Over the following decades he authored or co-authored eighteen journal articles on monetary economics as well as a textbook, Money and Banking, which went through three editions between 1976 and 1984. From 1967 to 1970 he was editor in chief of the Journal of Finance, where his leadership helped move the journal toward econometric analysis. He received the Amoco Outstanding Teacher Award in 1978.

During the second half of his career he reinvented himself as an expert on the central banking systems of island economies, with a focus on islands in the tropics. At that time he worked and conducted research in Fiji, Singapore, Yogyakarta, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Out of this research he published two monographs: Monetary Policy in Fiji (1987), and Finance & Monetary Policy in Singapore (1994).

On January 24, 2020, after a year of declining health, he died in Ames at the age of ninety-one. He is survived by his daughter Elaine Rees Luckett, by his sons Luther James “Jim” Luckett, Thomas Manley Luckett, and Brian Gilmore Luckett, and by six grandchildren: Moira, Molly, Toscane, JoHanna, Jamey and Liam.

Memorial contributions in honor of Dudley may be directed to the Northcrest Foundation, 1801 20th Street, Ames, Iowa 50010.

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