Eric's work focuses on the history of American business organizations and their ownership and governance, and more generally on the role of legal institutions in shaping economic and financial development. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2002, with a dissertation that analyzed the contracts and organizational forms employed in the American whaling industry in the nineteenth century. His most recent work has analyzed the effect of historical financial crises on the development of financial regulations; the impact of the Panic of 1907 on the American economy; and the evolution of the structure of ownership of American corporations. Eric’s work has been published in such journals as Business History Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. In 2008, he was named to the editorial board of the Journal of Economic History. In 2009, he received the Economic History Association’s Arthur Cole Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Economic History, and he also received the Explorations Prize for the best paper in the journal Explorations in Economic History. For the 2011-12 academic year he won a visiting scholar fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. During the 2014-15 academic year, he was Visiting Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University.