About

Scott Schaefer is the Dumke Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Honor of Katherine W. and E.R. Dumke, Jr., and serves as the Division Chair for the Division of Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations (QAMO). His professional role involves leadership in the field of quantitative analysis, focusing on markets and organizational structures. The information provided emphasizes his academic and administrative positions, highlighting his contributions to the university's research and educational missions in these areas.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Law
• Microeconomics
• Political science

Selected publications

• The Returns to Elite Degrees: The Case of American Lawyers

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2018-05-29 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  The authors study the market for young attorneys. Using data from two surveys of attorneys who passed the bar exam in 2000, they find that attorneys who graduate from law schools ranked in the Top 10 nationally earn considerably more than those without such a qualification, even compared to attorneys who graduate from schools ranked 11–20. The premium to an elite education carries over to an attorney’s undergraduate institution as well, and the findings suggest that elite bachelor’s degrees and elite law degrees are close substitutes in terms of their relationships to salaries. The elite–law school premium is more robust to various methods for correcting for selection on ability than the widely studied premium to attending a selective undergraduate institution. The authors consider several reasons elite-school premiums may exist in this labor market.

  PublisherDOI

• "The Returns to Elite Degrees: The Case of American Lawyers." Working Paper, 2016

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Firm/Employee Matching

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2015-09-18 · 31 citations

  articleSenior author

  The authors study the sources of match-specific value at large U.S. law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. They measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within certain firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by “natural advantage’’ factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive complementarities across graduates of a given school. Large law firms tend to hire from a select group of law schools, and individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated in terms of hires from particular schools. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms’ hiring strategies. Two main drivers of variation in law school concentration occur within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, school-based networks (and possibly productive complementarities) appear to be important because partners’ law schools drive associates’ law school composition even when controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when instrumenting for partners’ law schools.

  PublisherDOI

• Roadside MBA: Back Road Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Executives and Small Business Owners

  Medical Entomology and Zoology · 2014-06-10 · 1 citations

  bookOpen accessSenior author
  Publisher

• Firm/Employee Matching: An Industry Study of American Lawyers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2012-12-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We study the sources of match-specific value at large American law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. We measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by "natural advantage" factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive spillovers across graduates of a given school. We show that large law firms tend to be concentrated with regard to the law schools they hire from and that individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. There are two main drivers of variation in law school concentration within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, we show that school-based networks (and possibly productive spillovers) are important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when we instrument for partners' law schools.

  Publisher

• "Welcome to the Club: The Returns to an Elite Degree for American Lawyers." Working Paper, 2012

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2012-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Firm/Employee Matching: An Industry Study of American Lawyers

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2012-12-01 · 23 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We study the sources of match-specific value at large American law firms by analyzing how graduates of law schools group into law firms. We measure the degree to which lawyers from certain schools concentrate within firms and then analyze how this agglomeration can be explained by "natural advantage" factors (such as geographic proximity) and by productive spillovers across graduates of a given school. We show that large law firms tend to be concentrated with regard to the law schools they hire from and that individual offices within these firms are substantially more concentrated. The degree of concentration is highly variable, as there is substantial variation in firms' hiring strategies. There are two main drivers of variation in law school concentration within law offices. First, geography drives a large amount of concentration, as most firms hire largely from local schools. Second, we show that school-based networks (and possibly productive spillovers) are important because partners' law schools drive associates' law school composition even controlling for firm, school, and firm/school match characteristics and when we instrument for partners' law schools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Welcome to the Club: The Returns to an Elite Degree for American Lawyers

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2012-01-01 · 5 citations

  preprintSenior author

  Competition for seats in elite U.S. graduate school programs has intensified dramatically over the past 40 years. In this paper, we study the market for young attorneys to illuminate the role that elite graduate programs play in human capital development. We find that attorneys who graduate from law schools ranked in the top ten nationally earn considerably more than those without such a qualification, even compared to attorneys who graduate from schools ranked 11-20. The premium to an elite education carries over to an attorney's undergraduate institution as well, and we find that elite bachelors and elite law degrees appear to be close substitutes in terms of their effects on salaries. We compare our findings to the broader literature on the returns to attending a selective college, and find that the elite-law-school premium is more robust to various methods for correcting for selection on ability than the broader premium to attending a selective college. We discuss several potential reasons for why an elite school premium may exist in this labor market.

  Publisher

• American BigLaw Lawyers and the Schools that Produce Them: A Profile and Rankings

  2011-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  We profile the lawyers that work at the largest 300 American law firms as of the Summer of 2008. We show how gender, years of experience, prestige of law school, and other qualities vary across lawyers of different rank and firms of different prestige. Geography is an important determinant of where lawyers work, with many going to undergraduate school and law school near where they ultimately practice. Geography is less important, however, at more prestigious firms and for graduates of higher ranked firms. We then go on to rank law firms based on the prestige of the law schools they attended and we rank law schools based on their success at placing lawyers at BigLaw firms. Chicago, Harvard, and Yale law schools are the clear leaders in placing graduates at BigLaw firms. We provide important caveats about these rankings.

  Publisher

• Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2010-05-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We survey the Personnel Economics literature, focusing on how firms establish, maintain, and end employment relationships and on how firms provide incentives to employees. This literature has been very successful in generating models and empirical work about incentive systems. Some of the unanswered questions in this area --for example, the empirical relevance of the risk/incentive tradeoff and the question of whether CEO pay arrangements reflect competitive markets and efficient contracting -are likely to be very difficult to answer due to measurement problems. The literature has been less successful at explaining how firms can find the right employees in the first place. Economists understand the broad economic forces --matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information --that firms face in trying to hire. But the main models in this area treat firms as simple black-box production functions. Less work has been done to understand how different firms approach the hiring problem, what determines the firm-level heterogeneity in hiring strategies, and whether these patterns conform to theory. We survey some literature in this area and suggest areas for further research.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Oyer

  47 shared

• Rachel M. Hayes

  9 shared

• K. Glassmeier

  Technische Universität Braunschweig

  4 shared

• Rachel Hayes

  Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

  4 shared

• A. Balogh

  Obuda University

  4 shared

• Mark Shanley

  University of Illinois Chicago

  3 shared

• Qiugang Zong

  Peking University

  3 shared

• David Besanko

  Northwestern University

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Dumke Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Honor of Katherin…