Lars Lefgren

Who is Lars Lefgren?

Lars Lefgren is an American Economist trained at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who is a professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, specializing in labor economics and causal identification strategies.

Lefgren received his bachelors degree from BYU in 1996 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001.

Professor Lefgren has done work showing the impact of summer schools for students requiring remediation by comparing the limit of students who barely passed and barely failed the threshold of remediation. He has shown that parents value student satisfaction in teacher selection over student achievement improvements, except for poor students. Those parents from poor homes that request a particular teacher, ask for teachers who have reputations for student-testing improvement. He has also established that most of the test-score boost from good teaching erodes after a year. While the scores erode, Chetty et al. found that score improvements persist at some human capital level to improve the future wages of the student. Lefgren is ranked in the top 6% of economists worldwide.