After graduating from Stuyvesant High School at age 16, he was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mathematics.
At the time, many large businesses had become the targets of corporate raids and leveraged buyouts because, the bankers said, their pension plans had accumulated more funds than they needed.
He noticed that the principles of financial economics, in which the cost of a transaction to the buyer and the seller are carefully measured and tracked, were being applied to many areas of finance—except pension plans.
In 1995, at the age of 53, he enrolled at the Wharton School with the aim of (in his words) "improving pension actuarial practice through research and intelligent criticism".
[1] In 2000, with his newly earned doctorate, he became an outspoken advocate for pension actuaries to adopt a model driven by financial economics.