I earned my Bachelor's degree in 1978 at John Carroll University where I majored in economics with a minor in math.  I was a first-generation college student and lived at home while earning my degree.  I then earned my Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.  My major field of study was international economics.  I also had a minor field in finance, but never enjoyed that subject and have forgotten (almost) all of the finance that I learned!  I arrived at MSU in August 1983 and have been here ever since.

My father was a factory worker who frequently complained (in the 1970s) that "everything was made in Japan," and that was costing U.S. jobs.  As a college student at first, then subsequently as a graduate student, I was learning that trade was a generally good thing.  I was having an increasingly hard time reconciling my personal life with my intellectual life.  The dissonance between the two started me on my career-long research agenda of trying to piece together the complex connections between national labor markets and world product markets.  Much of my research has been undertaken jointly with my MSU colleague Carl Davidson.  Over the last 4 decades, we have published many papers on the subject.  We reprinted a selection of those papers along with some background description in International Trade with Equilibrium Unemployment, a book published by Princeton University Press.  That book opens with a preface where each of us writes about how we came to be interested in the issues.  My story explains how my original idea hit like a bolt of lightning.

In am an External Research Fellow for the Nottingham Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy, and I am also an associate editor for the Review of International Economics.  I have consulted with the World Bank.