I began in January 2024 as the director of the new Center for Regional Economic Research at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Most recently, I was at Lindenwood in St. Charles, Missouri, from 2011 to 2023 as a professor of economics and the founding director of the Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise and director of the Center for Applied Economics. In addition, I have been a research fellow at the Show-Me Institute since 2011.

Prior to joining Lindenwood, I was a vice president and regional economics adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In addition, I spent ten years as an academic in the economics departments at West Virginia University and Birkbeck College, University of London.

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My main research fields have been in theoretical and empirical trade, although my more recent focus has been on modeling and estimating the macroeconomy as the interaction of regional and local economies.

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A native of Upstate New York, I received my BA in Economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton (1984) and my MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo (1986, 1989).