Stanford Business School Professor Named to White House Tax Reform Panel

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 27, 2005--President George W. Bush has appointed Edward P. Lazear, an economist at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and the Hoover Institution, to the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. The bipartisan panel 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.

"The tax system is unbearably complicated and needs a fresh look," said Stanford Graduate School of Business Dean Robert L. Joss. "Ed Lazear will bring a depth of knowledge and insight to the problem." Lazear, 56, is the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics at Stanford Business School and the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is an expert on worker productivity and was the founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics.

Lazear has written extensively on labor markets, pensions and retirement, microeconomic theory, worker compensation, education, and immigration. His scholarly work includes studies on employee incentives, age-earnings profiles, profit-sharing, and career prospects. He also has written about government policies on distribution of income within the household, discrimination, affirmative action, and comparable worth.

He 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.

Other members of the new panel include its chairman, Connie Mack III, a former U.S. senator and a senior advisor at Shaw Pittman LLP; Vice Chairman John Breaux, a former U.S. senator who served on the Finance Committee and its subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight; William Eldridge Frenzel, a former U.S. representative who served on the Budget Committee and the Ways and Means Committee; Elizabeth Garrett, professor of law at the University of Southern California; former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission Timothy J. Muris, who is the Foundation Professor at George Mason School of Law and of counsel at O'Melveny & Myers LLP; James Michael Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Charles O. Rossotti, senior advisor to The Carlyle Group; and Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co.

The announcement of the panel was made by the White House on Jan. 7, 2005.