John Shoven

Research: Corporate finance (dividend behavior, mergers and acquisitions, share purchase), social security and private pensions, stock and bond returns, mutual funds, federal, personal and corporate income taxation, international cost-of-capital comparisons, applied general equilibrium analysis
Current Research: Asset allocation and asset location theory; the effects of taxes on the relative performance of mutual funds; the long-run future of pension fund saving; public policy towards pensions
Teaching: Public finance, introductory economics, intermediate micro-economics, investment

John B. Shoven, 59, 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 (SIEPR). He is also a Senior Fellow by Courtesy of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He has served as the Chairman of the Economics Department (1986-89), Director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (1988-93) and Dean of Humanities and Sciences (1993-98). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves as the Director of their West Coast office.

Dr. Shoven received a B.A. in physics from UCSD in 1969 and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1973. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1973, was granted tenure in 1977 and became a full professor in 1979. Over the course of his career, he has published more than one hundred professional articles and has authored, co-authored, or edited twenty books. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, he received TIAA-CREF’s Paul A. Samuelson Award for Excellence for Outstanding Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.

Dr. Shoven’s research is in the fields of public finance, corporate finance and investments. He has written on corporate taxation, personal taxation, saving in the U.S. economy, public policy towards pensions, mutual fund taxation, long-run returns in equity markets, the expensing of stock options, and Social Security. If there is a theme to his publications, it is that he works on private and public sector policies that can be changed for the better. For example, his work on taxation and mutual funds in the early and mid-1990s with Joel Dickson stimulated the introduction of tax efficient mutual funds. A second example is his work in 1996 on the taxation of pensions (“The Taxation of Pension: A Shelter Can Become A Trap”), which led to the elimination of the 15% tax on excess pension accumulations and excess pension distributions as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. In a third case, Dr. Shoven was amongst those advocating inflation-indexed government bonds. He organized a SIEPR conference at the National Press Club on the possibility of the government issuing such securities about one year before they were introduced. The conference included Undersecretary of Treasury Larry Summers and representatives from Vanguard, TIAA-CREF and Barclays Global Investors. Finally, Dr. Shoven’s several books on Social Security have received acclaim and have influenced the debate underway in the country about how to restructure the system and assure its solvency. Dr. Shoven served on the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement for the 1994-96 Advisory Council on Social Security. His most recent work deals with reforming the U.S. Federal Budget. He has testified in Congress a number of times including appearances before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He regularly writes a column in On Investing, a Bloomberg magazine.

Dr. Shoven teaches public finance, investments, microeconomics, and introductory economics at Stanford. He is proud of his many former Ph.D. students some of whom now teach at Wharton, The University of Michigan, Stanford, The University of Texas, Wisconsin, and UCLA as well as those who work in the private sector at such places as Vanguard, Financial Engines, and Deutsche Bank. Each summer for the past twenty years, Professor Shoven has run a weeklong workshop for high school teachers of economics.

Dr. Shoven is Chairman of the Board of Cadence Design Systems. He has been on their board since 1992 and has been Chairman since 2005. He is chairman of the Nominating and Governance Committees and a member of both the Compensation Committee and the Audit Committee. He is also a member of the board of American Century Funds.