Scott Schaefer is Kendall D. Garff Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Finance at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. Professor Schaefer joined the Eccles faculty in 2005, and served as the School’s Associate Dean from 2009 to 2012. From 1995 to 2005 he was a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he was a member of the Management and Strategy Department and held the Richard M. Paget Chair in Management Policy. He was the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance at Utah State University during Fall 2012.
Professor Schaefer’s research focuses on the personnel economics and the economics of organization. He has published on diverse topics such as CEO compensation, stock-based compensation for lower-level managers, the legal labor market, firms’ hiring practices, and the effects of employment discrimination protections on labor markets.
Highly decorated as an instructor, Professor Schaefer has taught a variety economics-based business classes to undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA and PhD students. At Kellogg, Professor Schaefer won the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award three times. At Utah, he has won the Executive MBA Teaching Excellence Award, the Masters Excellence Teaching Award, the Marvin J. Ashton Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award, and the Brady Teaching Excellence Award. He has taught in leading Executive MBA programs around the world, including Kellogg’s Evanston and Miami programs, the joint Kellogg/HKUST program in Hong Kong, and the joint Kellogg/WHU program in Germany. He was selected as “Best Teacher” in the Kellogg/WHU program by the Class of 2016.
Professor Schaefer is co-author of two books: Roadside MBA: Backroad Lessons for Executives, Entrepreneurs, and Small Business Owners (Business Plus, 2014), and the leading textbook Economics of Strategy (Wiley, 2015). He was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2015 for the multimedia project Big Lessons from America’s Small Business, and co-developed the MOOC Strategic Thinking for Growing Your Enterprise, which was distributed by Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2016. He is the founder and co-organizer of the Utah Winter Business Economics Conference, and has advised corporations and governments on a broad range of topics.
Scott Schaefer earned a PhD in Economic Analysis and Policy from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1995. He holds a bachelors degree from Stanford University, with a double-major in Economics and Mathematical and Computational Sciences. Professor Schaefer lives in Salt Lake City with his two children, and in his spare time he enjoys dogs, baseball, cycling, gardening, and road trips.