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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Steven Shavell

American economist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 17, 2026
Entity authorityQ2347681 ↗
Source-derived summary

Steven Shavell is an economist who is currently Samuel R. Rosenthal Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School. Shavell is the founder and director of the School's John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business.

Biography

Steven Shavell graduated from the University of Michigan in 1968. He obtained a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1973. Shavell is working on the economic analysis of law, including topics such as contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and legal process. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Selected publications

Shavell, S., 1979. Risk sharing and incentives in the principal and agent relationship. Bell Journal of Economics, 10(1), pp. 55–73.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Steven Shavell” as american economist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1968, 1973, 1979—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Steven, Shavell and American can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american economist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2347681. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1973 and 1979.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Steven Shavell”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Steven Shavell primary sources, Steven Shavell archive and Steven research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Steven Shavell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.