Stanford Business School Economist Edward Lazear Nominated to Chair White House Council of Economic Advisers.

STANFORD, Calif. -- President George W. Bush has nominated Stanford Graduate School of Business economist Edward P. Lazear as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The nomination was announced January 30.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers provides the President with objective economic analysis and advice on the development and implementation of a wide range of domestic and international economic policy issues. Lazear's nomination as a member of the panel will go before the U.S. Senate for confirmation. He has been nominated to replace Ben Bernanke, whom Bush appointed to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bernanke, who spent many years at Princeton University, is also a former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member.

"Ed Lazear will bring significant depth of knowledge and insight to the White House Council of Economic Advisors," said Robert L. Joss, Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "The scope of his work in economics is extremely broad, including productivity, incentives, employment, education, immigration and other economic reforms."

Lazear, the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is also the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

He was also a member of President Bush's advisory Tax Reform Panel, a post to which he was appointed in early 2005. The bipartisan panel, which issued a report last November, was put together to advise the Secretary of the Treasury on how to simplify the U.S. tax code, make it fairer, encourage economic growth and job creation, and strengthen U.S. global competitiveness.

At Stanford, Lazear developed research and ideas that became the seminal work in the area of "personnel economics," a field that marries labor economics analysis to organizational behavior. He authored the book Personnel Economics, published by MIT Press in 1995.

Founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, Lazear is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Board on Testing and Assessment. His research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation. Lazear was the first vice-president and president of the Society of Labor Economists.

He edited Economic Transition in Eastern Europe and Russia: Realities of Reform (Hoover Institution Press, 1995). Coauthor or coeditor of nine other books, Lazear's newest edited volume is Education in the Twenty-first Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2002). He also edited the textbook Personnel Economics for Managers (Wiley, 1998). Other publications include Culture Wars in America (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1996).

Among his more than one hundred published papers, the following are of special note: "The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline," Journal of Political Economy (2004); "Economic Imperialism," for the millennium issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000); "Culture and Language," Journal of Political Economy (12/99); "Educational Production," Quarterly Journal of Economics (2001), "Performance, Pay and Productivity," American Economic Review (12/2000); "Peer Pressure and Partnerships," with Eugene Kandel, Journal of Political Economy (8/92); "Job Security Provisions and Employment," Quarterly Journal of Economics (8/90); "Pay Equality and Industrial Politics," Journal of Political Economy (6/89); "Salaries and Piece Rates," Journal of Business (7/86); "Retail Pricing and Clearance Sales," American Economic Review (3/86); "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts," with Sherwin Rosen, Journal of Political Economy (10/81); "Why Is There Mandatory Retirement?" Journal of Political Economy (12/79); "Personnel Economics: Past Lessons and Future Direction," Presidential Address to the Society of Labor Economists, Journal of Labor Economics (1999); and "Globalization and the Market for Teammates," Frank Paish Memorial Lecture to the Royal Economic Society, Warwick, England, Economic Journal (1999).

Lazear taught previously at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, where he was a professor of economics. He has been a visiting professor at many universities and institutes around the world. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business in 1994, was named the Michael and Monica Spence Faculty Fellow in 2000-2001, and received the Distinguished Service Award from Stanford University in 2002. He has an honorary doctorate from Albertson College of Idaho and delivered the 2002 UCLA Commencement Address.

Lazear was awarded the 1998 Leo Melamed Biennial Prize for outstanding research and the 2003 Adam Smith Prize from the European Association of Labor Economists. He was awarded the 2004 Prize in Labor Economics from the Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn.

Born in 1948, Professor Lazear grew up in Los Altos, CA. He received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He lives in Portola Valley with his wife and daughter.

Lazear's biography and papers can be accessed through his personal webpage at http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/lazear/.