Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

 My Stanford colleague Eddie Lazear passed away last month, from pancreatic cancer. (When he moved from the University of Chicago to Stanford around 1995 he told me that he moved when he did because he was aware that the academic market for professors became thin after one's 50th birthday.) 

Prominent among his many accomplishments were his studies of labor markets from the inside out, i.e. from the perspectives of workers inside firms.

His papers include

Lazear, Edward P. "Why is there mandatory retirement?." Journal of political economy 87, 6 (1979): 1261-1284.

Lazear, Edward P., and Sherwin Rosen. "Rank-order tournaments as optimum labor contracts." Journal of political Economy 89, 5 (1981): 841-864.

Lazear, Edward P. "Performance pay and productivity." American Economic Review 90, 5 (2000): 1346-1361.

He founded the Journal of Labor Economics, and its current issue, Volume 39, Number 1, January 2021, published just now, contains his most recent paper:

Why Are Some Immigrant Groups More Successful Than Others?

Abstract: "The composition of immigrants depends not only on immigrant choice but also on immigration policy, because slots are rationed. Policy determines immigrant attainment, as evidenced by immigrants from Algeria having higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Theory predicts and evidence confirms that immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to population and education levels at home. A parsimonious specification has only two variables yet explains a majority of the variation in educational attainment of US immigrant groups. The theory and predictions are bolstered by Swedish data."

Here is the memorial statement from the JOLE (with a link to a special issue in honor of Eddie's 65th birthday: IN MEMORIAM: EDWARD LAZEAR

He was an an influential policy advisor as well as an institution builder.  Here's his Stanford obituary:

NOVEMBER 24, 2020: Trailblazing economist and presidential adviser Edward Lazear dies at 72

Here's a photo I took of him in December 2011 at a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Rationality Center in Jerusalem.

Eddie Lazear (1948-2020)