I'm a little late to this news, but widely respected labour economist Ed Lazear passed away last week. The New York Times has an excellent obituary, as does Stanford, where Lazear had been a professor since the mid-1990s.
Lazear is perhaps best known to most people as the chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors at the time of the Global Financial Crisis. However, my ECONS102 students would perhaps recognise him as the originator of the idea of tournament effects in labour economics, as an explanation for why a small number of workers in certain occupations receive much higher pay than others that are only slightly less productive. His contributions to economics ranged across labour economics and the economics of human resources, as well as the economics of education, immigration, and productivity. Many past Waikato economics students would have been exposed to his work in a third-year paper on the economics of human resources that, sadly, we no longer teach.
Lazear's book, with the title Personnel Economics, has been recommended to me by several people, but I have yet to purchase a copy. Eventually, you may see a book review on it at some point in the future. Similarly, I anticipate additional bits of content from Lazear popping up in my ECONS102 topic on the labour market. Unfortunately, he was never in the conversation for a Nobel Prize, with many other labour economists likely higher up in the queue. Nevertheless, he will be missed.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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