Lars Lefgren (born October 1972) is an American Economist trained at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who is a professor of economics at Brigham Young University (BYU), specializing in labor economics and applied econometrics.
Lars Lefgren (born October 1972) is an American Economist trained at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who is a professor of economics at Brigham Young University (BYU), specializing in labor economics and applied econometrics.
Lefgren received a bachelor's degree in economics from BYU in 1996 and a PhD in business economics from the University of Chicago in 2001.
Lefgren's research into educational policy and the American educational system is extensive, and has been published in top journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Labor Economics. His work in this field covers such topics as principals' abilities to identify capable teachers, the effectiveness of teacher training programs, the effect of school on juvenile crime, and the effect of grade retention on high school completion, as well as many others. Notably, Lefgren has done work showing the impact of summer schools for students requiring remediation by comparing the limit of students who barely passed and barely failed the threshold of remediation. He has shown that parents value student satisfaction in teacher selection over student achievement improvements, except for poor students. Those parents from poor homes that request a particular teacher, ask for teachers who have reputations for student-testing improvement. He has also established that most of the test-score boost from good teaching erodes after a year. While the scores erode, Chetty et al. (2011) found that score improvements persist at some human capital level to improve the future wages of the student. [1]
In recent years, Lefgren has also published in the field of econometric theory. His work with Brigham Frandsen, another member of the faculty of the BYU Economics Department, has been focused on such topics as rank similarity and partial identification.
On one occasion, Lefgren was interviewed by a news organizations for his opinions relating to his research expertise. In a statement recorded in The Daily Universe, Lefgren expressed the view that "Raising the minimum wage in Utah probably wouldn't affect [people] much." [2]
Lefgren is ranked in the top 6% of economists worldwide. [3] In 2007, he won the BYU's Young Scholar Award. [4] At the end of 2018, his research had over 6000 citations according to Google Scholar. He is also known for having won the competition of time spent standing on one leg in the fourth grade, although later he acknowledged that he may have let his leg down early, invalidating the record. [5]
With a few notable exceptions, Lefgren's teaching has been well received and he is a popular professor within the BYU Economics Department. As of February 2019, he had 4.0 out of 5.0 on Rate My Professor, putting him above the average. His teaching is focused on building intuition and on developing a deep conceptual understanding of simple models. He is well known for his use of examples and hypothetical thought experiments to help students see the application of abstract ideas. Famously, the Dungeons and Dragons-inspired analogies of the "Die of Great Power" and the "Die of Correct Size" have been used to teach about the statistical concepts of size and power.
On a more personal note, Lefgren has two daughters and two sons, because of his convex preferences. He also owns a poodle named Dexter. [6] Lefgren enjoys the song "Come Dancing" by The Kinks because the first verse illustrates that capital is fixed in the short-run but flexible in the long-run. [7] In terms of fashion, Dr. Lefgren has expressed a proclivity for wearing gold-toed socks, admitting that he is likely the youngest person in the set of people who frequently do so. [8] When he was young, Lefgren enjoyed the game Dungeons and Dragons, having played a Barbarian all the way to level 18. This hobby has not, however, followed him in his post-college years. In response to requests to serve as a Dungeon Master, he has publicly declared that he has "hung up his dice" and no longer plays the game. [9]
Lefgren is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As part of his active involvement in his church, he has served in a number of volunteer positions, including two years as a full-time missionary in Rome, Italy starting when he was 19. As a result of his service there, he speaks Italian.
In fall of 2015, Lefgren appeared in the Divine Comedy music video "Fix You" promoting BYU OIT, using the song "Fix You" by Coldplay. [10]
Franco Modigliani was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
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Ernest Leroy Wilkinson was an American academic administrator, lawyer, and prominent figure in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was president of Brigham Young University (BYU) from 1951 to 1971, simultaneously overseeing the entire LDS Church Educational System (CES). He is credited with the expansion of BYU. Under his presidency, the student body increased six times to over twenty-five thousand students due to the physical growth of the university and his aggressive recruiting policies. The number of colleges at the university increased from five to thirteen and the number of faculty members increased four-fold. Wilkinson focused on recruiting more faculty and convincing current faculty to receive education outside the university. As a result, the number of teachers with doctorate degrees increased from 50 to 500. Associate and doctoral programs were created for BYU.
George Henry Brimhall was president of Brigham Young University (BYU) from 1904 to 1921. After graduating from Brigham Young Academy (BYA), Brimhall served as principal of Spanish Fork schools and then as district superintendent of Utah County schools, finally returning to BYU. In April 1904, Brimhall became president of the school, which had become BYU in October 1903. As president of BYU, Brimhall helped institute the collegiate program, departments for specific subjects, and an emphasis on religious learning.
Orley Clark Ashenfelter is an American economist and the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. His areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. He was influential in contributing to the applied turn in economics.
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Lars Erik Oscar Svensson, is a Swedish economist. He was on the faculty of Princeton University 2001–2009. Since June 2014, he is Affiliated Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Since 2009 he is Affiliated Professor at Stockholm University. He has published significant research in macroeconomics, especially monetary economics, international trade and general equilibrium theory. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a well-known proponent of price path targeting, a topic on which he published significant research.
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James B. McDonald is the Clayne L. Pope Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, specializing in econometrics. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from Utah State University in 1964; his M.S. in Mathematics from Utah State University in 1966; and his Ph.D. in Economics from Purdue University in 1970.
Wim Driehuis is a Dutch economist, Emeritus Professor Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam.
Rulon Dean Pope is the Warren and Wilson Dusenberry Professor at Brigham Young University, specializing in agricultural economics, econometrics and microeconomic theory. He received his B.S. from Brigham Young University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley in 1976. He taught at the University of California, Davis (1976–79) and Texas A&M University (1979–82) prior to moving to BYU. Pope served as Chair of the BYU Economics department 1986-1992 and as Associate Dean of the College of Family, Home, and Social Science 2001–2006.
David E. Spencer is a retired professor of economics at Brigham Young University. He taught and did research in macroeconomics, econometrics, and monetary theory. He is the author of eighteen peer-reviewed publications including Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Spencer is a founding member of the BYU Macroeconomics and Computational Lab. In addition to teaching various economics classes, Spencer also taught American Heritage at BYU for several years.
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Thomas L. Martin was a renowned soil agronomist. He was a professor at Brigham Young University and became the Dean of the College of Applied Sciences.
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Edwin Leuven is a Dutch economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo. He is one of the leading European education economists, with a focus on the economics of training.
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