Lars Lefgren

Lars Lefgren (born October 1972) is an American Economist trained at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who is a professor of Economics at Brigham Young University (BYU), specializing in labor economics and causal identification strategies.

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

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. (2011) found that score improvements persist at some human capital level to improve the future wages of the student. Lefgren has expressed the opinion that "Raising the minimum wage in Utah probably wouldn't affect [people] much."

Lefgren is ranked in the top 6% of economists worldwide. In 2007, he won the BYU's Young Scholar Award.

On a more personal note, Lefgren has two daughters and two sons, because of his convex preferences. He also owns a poodle named Dexter. And, he is known for having won the competition of time spent standing on one leg in the fourth grade. Lefgren enjoys the song "Come Dancing" by the Kinks because the first verse illustrates that capital is fixed in the short-run but flexible in the long-run.

In fall of 2015, Lefgren appeared in the Divine Comedy music video "Fix You" promoting BYU OIT, using the song "Fix You" by Coldplay.