I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

Our family life was certainly not intellectual.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.