Biography

I grew up in the New York City suburbs.   I was an indifferent student, and I still owe apologies to my high-school teachers.  I spent a lot of my youth playing chess and traveling to tournaments, which took up most of the time I should have spent studying.  The good news is that it is possible to get a chess fix online these days, and the best place to do that is the Internet Chess Club.  I average less than two hours a week on that site.  Honest.

I came to Yale as an undergraduate in 1985.  I had no clear idea what to do with my life until I met James Tobin.  He was a Professor of Economics and Finance at Yale, and the Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 1981.  I worked for Tobin for three years as a research assistant.  Tobin was one of the giants of 20th century economics, but never lost his Midwest modesty.  He treated everyone with dignity and respect – even research assistants who made mistakes on simple tasks. I decided I wanted to be like him when I grew up.   This has turned out to be an impossible task, but the effort remains worthwhile.  Professor Tobin died in 2002.  A few years later, I was asked to contribute the entry on “James Tobin” for the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences.  You can read the entry here.

I got my Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1994.  My thesis advisor was Eric Maskin, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007.  I think I embarrassed my advisor by writing perhaps the silliest dissertation in the history of the Harvard economics department, including chapters about the Jeopardy! game show and about betting on the NCAA basketball tournament.   The specific papers may have seemed whimsical, but the main idea was serious: “how do people make decisions?”

After graduation, I stayed at Harvard for five years as a junior faculty member.  I continued to be interested in my dissertation topic, but there are only so many game shows in the world that one can study.  I decided that financial economics would be a great field for someone who loved data and was interested in decision-making.  I started writing finance papers in the late 1990s and moved to Wharton in 1999. 

Wharton was a wonderful place to do research in finance.  It is huge department, and for any question you might have, there is someone there to answer it.  When I arrived at Wharton, there was a need for someone to teach venture capital.  I did not know much about it at the time, but I volunteered and took on the course.  This turned out to be a great experience, and I have been teaching various VC courses since then.  In 2006 I published a textbook on the topic.

I get many questions from students who would like to get into venture capital after they graduate.  The sad reality is that this is very hard to do. How hard?  Check out this video from the Wharton Follies 2006.  I play the bald guy.

In January 2008 I moved to the Yale School of Management, where I am a professor of finance. So I am back where I started (sort of).   Just after I moved, the whole financial system started to collapse. The first big event was the fall of Bear Stearns in March of 2008.  This event hit very close to home for me.  I worked at Bear Stearns for three summers during college, and I had a great learning experience with a job that allowed me rotate across almost every department. I did not go to Bear Stearns after college, but my father did join in 1989, and he worked there in some form right up until the end.  Watching what happened to Bear in March 2008 – seeing how fast a large and powerful financial institution can collapse – had a profound effect on my research interests.  Since then, I have been spending much of my time trying to understand financial crises.  I don’t expect to finish this project anytime soon.