Biography
Few people start their academic journeys knowing that they want to be professional economists, and that was certainly true for me. I received my bachelor of science in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa. Prior to doing graduate work, I worked as a petroleum engineer in Oklahoma, Texas, and in the United Kingdom. My experiences in the North Sea were especially interesting, as I helped generate early estimates of the sizes of the unprecedentedly large natural gas fields lying between the UK and Norway. I was fascinated by both the massive technological challenges faced in moving from discovery to production, and the enormous economic opportunities that would result from success in that endeavor. From then on I knew that my career would be influenced by both economics and engineering. At Stanford University I earned an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. minor in engineering-economic systems, as well as a Ph.D. in economics. Before coming to Northwestern, I held an appointment as an economist and engineer in the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy.
As a scholar, my research has concentrated on the fields of microeconomics, industrial organization, and public policy. Much of that work has focused on the wave of reform and restructuring that, since the late 1970s, has swept across the face of industries traditionally regulated in the United States or nationalized in Europe. In many of my articles and two of my books, I have analyzed the effects of government policy on prices, market structure, economic welfare and income distribution in various industries, including natural gas, electric power, telecommunications, railroads, pipelines and motor carriers.
Along with Professor David Besanko in the Kellogg School of Management, I have also coauthored a leading intermediate microeconomics textbook, now in its sixth edition in English. The book has also been published in several other languages, including Portuguese, Chinese, Italian, German, Greek, and (in 2022) Korean. It has been adopted in undergraduate economics courses and in graduate business programs at many universities around the world.
I have been fortunate to have held appointments in some wonderful institutions along the way. I have taught at Stanford University and at the California Institute of Technology. I also twice held appointments as a senior research fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Science Center Berlin), the first in 1982 and 1983 being especially memorable because it involved living in a city surrounded by 600,000 Russian troops and the iconic Wall for fifteen months during the height of the Cold War. For decades I have very much enjoyed productive interactions with the academic community in Europe. In 1997 I was honored to have been elected as the first non-European President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics, a leading international professional society in industrial organization.
I have always highly valued the privilege of teaching and mentoring the wonderfully talented undergraduate and graduate students at Northwestern. In 1997 I was greatly honored to receive Northwestern’s highest teaching award, the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. Beyond my research and teaching activities, I have also had the opportunity to serve in a number of administrative positions, serving as Director of the Kapnick Business Institutions Program for nine years, as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences for two years, and as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education at Northwestern for twelve years.
My wife, Jan, and I now spend much of our time at our home in Evanston, at our condo in Phoenix, and with our children and grandchildren in Connecticut, Phoenix, and Seattle.
