Smith, Bruce D. (1954–2002)

Abstract

Bruce David Smith was born on 21 September 1954 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and died in Rochester, Minnesota, on 9 July 2002. Smith graduated with a BA in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1977 and obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. Smith’s career began as an assistant professor at Boston College (1981–2). From there he moved to the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (1982–6), which was where his lifelong research interests in monetary history, monetary theory and financial intermediation blossomed among colleagues like Thomas Sargent, Neil Wallace, Ed Prescott, John Boyd and Warren Weber. After visits to Carnegie-Mellon and the University of California at Santa Barbara, he moved to the University of Western Ontario as an associate professor from 1987 to 1990. Smith moved to Cornell University in 1990 and finally to the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, where he was the Fred Hofheinz Regent’s Professor of Economics.