He is the Founding Director of the campus-affiliated, research-driven Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare.
[3] After completing his PhD, Scheffler took his first academic position in the economics department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
[1] He was also a visiting professor at Duke University in the Department of Economics and Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs.
[10] In 2015, he received the Gold Medal from Charles University in Prague for his longstanding and continued support of international scientific and educational collaboration.
[6] Scheffler received a $2 million award from the Attorney General of California to establish the Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare.
[11] The health economics center, affiliated with UC Berkeley, conducts empirical research on healthcare markets, accessibility, quality, and affordability, especially for low-income populations.
In 1999, as the Endowed Chair in Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare, Scheffler officially opened the doors to the Petris Center.
[2] Scheffler has advised a number of countries on workforce policy in regions including Peru, Chile, and Brazil as well as being a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, where he wrote his critically acclaimed book Is There a Doctor in the House?
[17] Through his lens of economics and policy, he examined the components that influence the future supply of doctors across specializations and geographic regions.
[18] A followup analysis appeared in "Projecting Shortages and Surpluses of Doctors and Nurses in the OECD: What Looms Ahead" published in 2018 in Health Economics, Policy and Law.
[22] The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today's Push for Performance changed the way people think about the growth and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
"[28] Scheffler and co-authors discovered a negative association between social capital and psychological distress in those with a below-median income.
In "The empirical relationship between community social capital and the demand for cigarettes" that appeared in 2006 in Health Economics, Scheffler and co-authors found that smokers smoked fewer cigarettes when subjected to higher social capital from religious groups, but the prevalence of smoking overall in the community is not affected by that.
[29] Scheffler has also co-authored the writing of World Scientific Series in Global Health Economics and Public Policy: Volume 2 with Chapter 6: Measures of Social Capital, published in Singapore.
that reviewed social capital and its relationship to physical well-being, psychological health, and education, both at an individual and communal level.
He launched a series on social capital and health with the goal of improving research on it internationally, with the first meeting in 2006 and biennial workshops hosted at various universities afterwards.
[34] In 2016, he led a public lecture called "The relationship between social capital and health: What mechanisms and empirical evidence" at the University of Oxford as a feature of his Astor Visiting Lectureship.
It was cited in the May 19, 2021 hearing of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights.
Scheffler, Shortell, and their research team presented their findings in Sacramento with state legislators, stakeholders, and press, as well as invoked a discussion panel moderated by Deputy Cabinet Secretary Richard Figueroa.