Stanford University, USA, and IZA, Germany
IZA World of Labor role
Author
Research interest
Employee incentives, promotions, compensation, and productivity in firms
Positions/functions as a policy advisor
Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisers, The White House (2006–2009)
Past positions
Davies Family Professor of Economics (2017–2020) and Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow (Hoover Institution) (2002–2020), Stanford University, USA; Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management, Stanford University, USA (1995–2017); Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics, Graduate School of Business (1985–1992) University of Chicago, USA
Qualifications
PhD Economics, Harvard University, 1974
Selected publications
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“Personnel Economics.” In: Gibbons, R., and J. Roberts (eds). The Handbook of Organizational Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013; pp. 479–519 (with P. Oyer).
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“The Peter principle: A theory of decline.” Journal of Political Economy 112:S1 (2004): S141–S163 (Papers in Honor of Sherwin Rosen: A Supplement to Volume 112).
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“Educational production.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116:3 (2001): 777–803.
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Personnel Economics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.
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Personnel Economics for Managers. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
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Structural or cyclic? Labor markets in recessions
How should policy respond to higher unemployment?
Edward P. Lazear, August 2014Persistent unemployment after recessions and the policies required to bring it down are the subject of an ongoing debate. One view suggests there are fundamental changes in the labor market that imply a long-term higher rate of unemployment, requiring the implementation of structural policy reforms. The alternative view is that the slow recovery of the economy is due to cyclic reasons coming from lack of demand which prevents unemployment from falling quickly. Knowing whether higher unemployment is caused by structural change in the labor market or whether the problem is cyclic determines how effective policy can be in addressing the problem.MoreLess