MAY 2006
Faculty News
Lazear Chosen to head White House Economic Advisors.
Former Chief of Staff Andrew Card swears in Edward Lazear as wife Victoria and daughter Julie join President George W. Bush as witnesses.
Photo by Kimberlee Hewitt
Business School Professor Edward P. Lazear has been confirmed as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, the body that 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.
He was nominated by President George W. Bush 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, was a GSB faculty member from 1979 to 1985. Another Stanford Business School economist, Kathryn L. Shaw, served on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors.
“Ed Lazear will bring significant depth of knowledge and insight to the White House Council of Economic Advisors,” said Dean Robert L. Joss. “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, is a senior fellow at both the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
He was also a member of President Bush’s advisory Tax Reform Panel, which issued a report last November 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 Personnel Economics, published by MIT Press in 1995.
