Bio

Scott Schaefer is an economist, academic leader, and institution builder with a 30-year record of creating and transforming academic programs at leading research universities. At the University of Utah, he has built new academic programs and organizations, expanded faculty and research capacity, created new pathways for students, and taken on major university-wide strategic assignments.

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, since 2022, has served as Special Advisor to University President Taylor Randall. He joined the Eccles School faculty in 2005 and served as Associate Dean from 2009 to 2012.

In 2025, the University selected Professor Schaefer to serve simultaneously as Chair of the Department of Economics and Chair of the Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations (QAMO), with responsibility for leading a multi-year effort to bring the two units together in a new School of Economics. The initiative spans two colleges and brings together distinct faculty, programs, and intellectual traditions. Schaefer is leading a faculty-driven strategic planning process focused on strengthening research, expanding student opportunities and career pathways, building connections across the university, increasing the School’s external impact, and building the relationships and philanthropic support needed to expand its long-term resource base.

Schaefer is the inaugural Chair of QAMO, created in 2023 as a new academic unit within the David Eccles School of Business. The division grew out of a quantitatively advanced business-economics major Schaefer designed and launched in 2017, built on economics, mathematics, and statistics. The major, which is STEM-designated, has grown to nearly 200 students, with alumni going on to leading consulting and financial firms, public-policy institutions, and top graduate programs. QAMO now includes twelve full-time faculty, nine of them tenure-line.

Since 2022, Schaefer has served as Special Advisor to University President Taylor Randall, working on consequential university-wide strategic issues including revenue and enrollment management, intercollegiate athletics, and the University’s approach to standardized testing in admissions.

As Associate Dean from 2009 to 2012, Schaefer oversaw most of the Eccles School’s degree programs: the undergraduate program, the full-time MBA, and specialized master’s programs in accounting, finance, information systems, and real estate development. He was responsible for enrollment and tuition revenue across these programs. During his tenure, the School launched the master’s programs in information systems and real estate development, as well as new MBA/engineering dual degrees. He repositioned the full-time MBA, which rose 23 places in the U.S. News rankings; led a redesign of the undergraduate core curriculum; founded Business Scholars, an intensive experiential program for high-achieving first-year students that grew into a major Eccles School recruitment and student-success initiative; and initiated the School’s Business Career Services office.

Prior to joining Utah, 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 economics-based MBA electives, Strategy & Organization and Personnel Strategy, both of which continue to be taught at Kellogg today.

Schaefer’s research focuses on personnel economics and the economics of organizations. His work has examined CEO and employee compensation, firms’ hiring practices, the legal labor market, organizational design, and the effects of employment-discrimination protections on labor-market outcomes. His research has appeared in leading journals across economics, finance, and accounting, including the American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Highly decorated as an instructor, Schaefer has taught economics-based business courses to undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and PhD students and has won thirteen teaching awards, including Kellogg’s Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award three times and University of Utah awards in undergraduate, master’s, Executive MBA, and Online MBA programs. The Eccles School has also recognized him for student mentoring, career mentoring, and service to the School. He has taught in Executive MBA programs around the world, including Kellogg’s Evanston and Miami programs and the joint Kellogg/HKUST program in Hong Kong. In 2016, he was named “Best Professor” by the graduating class of the joint Kellogg/WHU Executive MBA program in Germany.

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 road trips around the world to interview owners and managers of small- and medium-sized businesses. The collaboration has produced a book (Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives 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, taught to undergraduates, MBAs, Executive MBAs, and online through Coursera.

In a review, The Economist magazine described the 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 textbook Economics of Strategy (Wiley, 2015), served as Jon M. Huntsman Visiting Presidential Professor at Utah State University in 2012, was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and received a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award in Business. He also 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 bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, where he double-majored in Economics and Mathematical and Computational Sciences and won two College World Series championship rings as statistician for Stanford baseball. He lives with his wife in Salt Lake City and enjoys dogs, baseball, bicycling, and road trips.