John Karl Scholz is president of the University of Oregon.
Formerly, he was the Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Prior to this he was the Nellie June Gray Professor of Economics and Department Chair at Wisconsin. In 1997-98 he was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1990-91 he was a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisors. Professor Scholz writes on diverse topics including household saving, the earned income tax credit and low-wage labor markets, financial barriers to higher education, and bankruptcy laws. In 2007 Scholz and his colleagues Ananth Seshadri and Surachai Khitatrakun were awarded the twelfth annual TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security for their paper Are Americans Saving ‘Optimally’ for Retirement. He is coeditor of the American Economic Journal – Economic Policy (though he soon will be giving up the coeditorship) and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His undergraduate degree is from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and his Ph.D. is from Stanford University.