Featured Researcher: John Shoven
John Shoven is a Research Associate of the NBER's programs in aging, public economics, and economic fluctuations and growth. He is the Director of the NBER's West Coast office.
Shoven is the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Wallace R. Hawley Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. From 1993 until 1998, he served as Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.
Shoven is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of more than one hundred published articles and the author or editor of more than twenty books, as well as a recipient of the Paul A. Samuelson Certificate for Excellence for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. He has testified before Congress numerous times, including appearances before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. In 1994-96, he was a member of the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement for the Advisory Council on Social Security. He regularly writes a column in On Investing, a Bloomberg magazine.
Shoven is a member of the board of directors of American Century Funds and Exponent, Inc. and is Chairman of the Board of Cadence Design Systems. Each summer for the past twenty-two years, Professor Shoven has run a weeklong workshop for high school teachers of economics.
Professor Shoven holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and a B.A. in physics from the University of California at San Diego.
Professor Shoven's research is in the fields of public finance, corporate finance, and investments, often focusing on private and public sector policy issues within these areas. For example, in the 1990s his work highlighted the need for tax-efficient mutual funds and for reductions in taxes on large pension accumulations and distributions. In 2008, he co-authored a book with former Secretary of Treasury and State George Shultz dealing with Social Security and health care reform. Professor Shoven's current research interests include economic demography (he is editing an NBER book-in-progress on the subject), the accuracy of the inflation adjustment of Social Security benefits, and the impact of financial market volatility on retirement intentions.
In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, traveling, and getting together with family and friends. He is an avid supporter of Stanford athletics and predicts that the Stanford Cardinal will be going to a football bowl game this fall for the first time in several years.
