Scott Schaefer is an accomplished academic entrepreneur, with a 30-year track record of building lasting structures that create value for students and stakeholders in leading business schools.
Professor Schaefer currently holds the Dumke Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Honor of Katherine W. and E.R. Dumke, Jr. at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, and serves as Special Advisor to University of Utah President Taylor Randall. He joined the Eccles School faculty in 2005, and served as Associate Dean from 2009 to 2012.
He is the inaugural Chair of the Eccles School’s Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations (QAMO), which was formed in 2023. The Division’s eleven full-time faculty (eight tenure line) are economists with an interest in business decision-making, and are known for their outstanding research productivity and societal impact.
The Division’s undergraduate program, which Professor Schaefer designed and continues to oversee, is a quantitatively advanced business-economics major. Launched in 2017, the program uses microeconomics, game theory and econometrics to show students how markets work, how to think strategically and how to analyze data. QAMO alumni apply these skills in a variety of career paths including consulting, data analytics, public policy, finance, operations management, and marketing, and have enrolled in graduate programs at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, and other leading institutions.
The QAMO Division houses the Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis. Established in 2017 with generous support from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, the Institute honors the legacy of Marriner S. Eccles, a native Utahn who authored the Banking Act of 1935, chaired the Federal Reserve through the Great Depression, and represented the United States at Bretton Woods. A banker, a businessman and an economist, Marriner S. Eccles stewarded Utah’s First Security Bank through the bank runs of the late 1920s, led the consortium of construction companies that constructed Hoover Dam, and explained the role of fiscal policy in supporting aggregate demand, foreshadowing the later work of John Maynard Keynes. The Institute supports faculty research and the QAMO undergraduate program, and hosts several conferences each year, including the Utah Winter Business Economics Conference, which Professor Schaefer founded in 2006.
As Associate Dean from 2009 to 2012, he founded the Eccles School’s Business Scholars program, an intensive experiential program for high-achieving freshman students featuring career development opportunities, case-based learning, and horizon-expanding travel opportunities. He also initiated the School’s Business Career Services office, triggered a rebranding of the full-time MBA program (achieving a 23-place jump in US News rankings), and led a redesign of the undergraduate core curriculum.
Prior to joining the Eccles School, Professor Schaefer spent a decade (1995-2005) on the faculty at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he held the Richard M. Paget Chair in Management Policy. At Kellogg, he originated or co-originated two popular economics-based MBA electives, Strategy & Organization and Personnel Strategy, and successfully mentored other faculty members who teach both courses successfully at Kellogg today.
His research focuses on 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 (three times), the Masters Excellence Teaching Award, the Marvin J. Ashton Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award, the Online MBA Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Brady Teaching Excellence Award (three times). He has been recognized by the Eccles School with awards for student mentoring, career mentoring, and professional service to the School (twice). In 2016, he was named “Best Professor” by the graduating class of the joint Kellogg/WHU Executive MBA program in Germany, and has taught in other leading Executive MBA programs around the world, including Kellogg’s Evanston and Miami programs — as well as the joint Kellogg/HKUST program in Hong Kong.
He merges his interests in business, road trips and buddy flicks through his long-running Roadside MBA project. Since 2010, he has joined economist friends Mike Mazzeo (Washington University) and Paul Oyer (Stanford) on a series of road trips to interview owners and managers of small- and medium-sized businesses all over the world. The trio have produced a book (Roadside MBA: Backroad Lessons for Executives, Entrepreneurs, and Small Business Owners, Business Plus, 2014), an Emmy-nominated multimedia series (Roadside MBA: Big Lessons from America’s Small Businesses), and a course (Strategies for Growth) that has been taught to undergraduates, MBAs, Executive MBAs and online through Coursera. In a review, The Economist magazine described book’s “surprisingly uplifting” message, concluding that “America’s roadside businesses are still doing a remarkable job of changing the world for the better.”
Professor Schaefer is a co-author of the leading textbook Economics of Strategy (Wiley, 2015), served as Jon M. Huntsman Visiting Presidential Professor at Utah State University (2012), was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (1990-93), won a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award in Business (1994), and proudly holds the Key to the City of Dothan, Alabama.
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. Scott lives with his wife in Salt Lake City, and in his spare time, he enjoys dogs, baseball, bicycling and road trips.