Edward P. Lazear

Chair, Becker Friedman Institute Board of Overseers
Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Edward P. Lazear is a labor economist and a founder of a field known as personnel economics. His research centers on employee incentives, promotions, compensation, and productivity in firms. He studies culture and language, with an emphasis on explaining the rise in multiculturalism in the United States. His recent work on entrepreneurship, leadership, and their relation to personnel economics includes a widely known theory of educational production.

The Morris A. Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1985, Lazear previously taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2006 to 2009. He is also founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics. He was a Visiting Fellow at the institute in the spring of 2010.

He received his AB and AM degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and his PhD in economics from Harvard University.