Edward Lazear

Edward Paul Lazear was an American economist. Lazear served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2006 to 2009. He was the chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush. He is known for his work on the educational production function, teaching to the test, and the importance of culture and language in explaining the rise of multiculturalism.

About Edward Lazear in brief

Summary Edward LazearEdward Paul Lazear was an American economist. Lazear served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2006 to 2009. He was the chief economic advisor to President George W. Bush. He is known for his work on the educational production function, teaching to the test, and the importance of culture and language in explaining the rise of multiculturalism. His 1995 book, Personnel Economics, was a seminal work that in addition to introducing the topic, encouraged a wave of subsequent research into labor and management relations. In a case study that examined management and workers at Glass Company, he noted that when the company moved towards a variable and incentive based pay, the company saw an increase in output and productivity by about 44%. He argued that companies should adjust payout structures to increase the payout to workers during retirement. In his career, Lazear made regular appearances on CNBC and Fox Business News. He also was a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. He died on August 17, 2017, in Los Altos, California. He received his doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1974. He worked here for twenty years before joining the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. At Stanford University, he was the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics from 1995 to 2017, and he went on to be the Davies Family Professor of Economics in 2017.

He had also been the Morris A. Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1985. He served as a Research Fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Center for Corporate Performance at the Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark and the IZA Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of the Saarland in Germany, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, and at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Vienna and Jerusalem. He was also the Astra-Erikkson Lecturer and the 1993 Wicksell Lecturer at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Stockholm, Sweden. His wife said he struggled at first, until he took an economics course and did well. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, before moving to Los Alto, California, He had been a Research Associate at theNational Bureau of economic Research since 1974. In 2000, he studied the relationship between incentive-based pay and increased worker output. He concluded that a shift towards incentive- based pay attracted more efficient workers and contributed an earlier case that examined the earlier shift towards hourly pay from the Glass Company that saw an increased output by 44%. In a paper in the Journal of Political Economy, he argued that why is there mandatory retirement? titled Why is there no mandatory retirement?, in 1979 he explored the motivations behind mandatory retirement.