Paul Oyer

The Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor & Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business · Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Paul Oyer studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices. His recent work looks at broad-based stock option plans, how firms use non-cash benefits, and how firms respond to limits on their ability to displace workers. His current projects include how labor market conditions early in a career shape the entire careers of MBAs and PhD economists, how firms identify and recruit workers in high-skill, competitive labor markets — with a focus on software engineers and newly minted lawyers — and, of most importance to his colleagues, how universities price and allocate parking spaces.

He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2007-2019, he served as Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor Economics. Paul works in personnel economics: how firms pay and provide incentives for their workers, how salespeople and executives react to incentive systems, and why some firms use broad-based stock option programs. He has also studied how random events early in a career — for MBAs, especially investment bankers, and for PhD economists — can have long-term ramifications, and, more recently, the gig economy using data from Uber and other companies.

Before moving to the GSB in 2000, Paul was on the faculty of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Earlier, he worked for the management consulting firm Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and for the technology firms 3Com Corporation and ASK Computer Systems. He holds a BA in math and computer science from Middlebury College, an MBA from Yale University, and an MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University. When not teaching or doing research, Paul spends time with his wife, Kathryn Stoner, a Stanford political scientist, their two grown children, two step-children, and two sweet but ill-behaved retrievers.