Bob received his undergraduate degree at Yale University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1963. After working at MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, he accepted a job in our department as an associate professor. He was promoted to professor in 1975. From 1980 to 1984 Bob served as chair of the department. During his term he oversaw the hiring of a large number of young economists, many of whom went on to become prominent researchers and pillars of our department.
During his time at MSU, Bob taught macroeconomics and money and banking to hundreds of MSU economics majors. He was also taught regularly in our Ph.D. level courses in macroeconomics, and supervised theses for a number of graduate students who went on to successful careers.
Much of Bob’s research was focused on questions related to monetary policy and its impact on the macroeconomy, and he was recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on this topic. His work appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and was often the result of collaborative research with former graduate students or his MSU colleagues. Two of his papers were coauthored with Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani. In 1988 he received the Michigan State Distinguished Faculty Award.
Although Bob’s work as an economist involved highly technical applications of economic theory and statistical/econometric methods, he was not an “absent minded professor”. Colleagues could not help but be impressed with the intelligence with which Bob discussed questions of undergraduate pedagogy, university administration, and current events both local and global.
In 1999 Bob retired from Michigan State and accepted a position as the Research Director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In 2009 he was promoted to Executive Vice President and Senior Policy Adviser at the St. Louis Fed, and he retired a second time in 2011. Shortly after this, Bob received and accepted another call to serve the MSU economics department, becoming an inaugural member of the MSU Department of Economics Advisory Board on which he served until 2016.
More information on Bob’s life and activities can be found at http://www.econ.msu.edu/people/docs/Rasche%20Obit%20June%202016.pdf