I joined the faculty of Dartmouth in 1994. My early scholarly work covered a range of topics, including Social Security, pensions, saving, taxation, portfolio choice, and executive compensation. My teaching, and some of my more recent scholarship, has expanded to include other topics, including social entrepreneurship and education finance. I am interested in research questions that probe the interface between the public and private sectors, that consider the importance of uncertainty in economic decisions and well-being, and that explore the incentives-insurance tradeoff that is ubiquitous in economics.

In 2003 – 2004, I joined the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, serving for a year as its chief economist. From 2004 - 2019, I served as the director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, an interdisciplinary social science center that seeks to educate, train, and inspire the next generation of public policy leaders. From 2021 - 2023, I had the honor of chairing the Department of Economics.

In November 2009, I was selected as the New Hampshire Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.