Friedrich Lutz (economist)

Friedrich August Lutz (29 December 1901, Sarrebourg; 4 October 1975, Zürich) was a German economist who developed the expectations hypothesis.

In 1920, Lutz graduated from high school in Stuttgart. He studied economics at Heidelberg University and Humboldt University of Berlin, where he met economist Walter Eucken, and went on to graduate from the University of Tübingen in 1925.

Lutz's first job was for the Association of German Engineering Institutions (Verein deutscher Maschinenbau-Anstalten (VdMA)) in Berlin. Then in 1929 he took a job as an assistant to Walter Eucken at Albert Ludwig University and lived in Freiburg. In 1934-1935 he had a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in England, after which he returned to Germany to again work for Eucken. However, Lutz was unable to continue his academic work because his liberal ideas were in conflict with those of the Nazi regime. In March 1937 he married Vera Smith, an economist, and they traveled to the United States on another Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1937-1938. After the fellowship ended, the couple remained in the United States, and in the Fall of 1938 Lutz took a job as an instructor at Princeton University.

During World War II Lutz worked at Princeton and rose to the rank of full professor. His wife worked as an economist at the International Finance Section of Princeton University and then for the League of Nations, also located in Princeton, New Jersey. It was while he was at Princeton that he published his paper explaining the expectations hypothesis. For the 1951-1952 academic year Lutz was a guest professor at Freiburg, after which he left Princeton and in 1953 became a professor at the University of Zurich. In the 1962-1963 academic year he was a visiting professor at Yale University, but he returned to Zürich where he taught until retiring in 1972. He died in Zurich three years later.

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