Larry WohlEmeriti

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I joined Gustavus in the fall of 1983, coming from graduate studies at Washington State University.  With the bulk of my graduate training in applied areas of microeconomics, I have focused my teaching on four main courses: Managerial Economics, Government & Business, Labor Economics, and Principles of Microeconomics.  However, I have also taught extensively outside of the economics area, both to help cover departmental needs and to pursue personal interests.  I have offered a seminar on entrepreneurship numerous times while serving as the Confer Chair in Entrepreneurshipt.  I taught Production and Operations Management twice, a modest leap from the content of Managerial Economics that challenged me, but also informed some of my other classes.    More recently, I developed a new course in The Economics of Strategy, which is suitable as a stand-alone course for upper-level Economics majors, but also be a good follow-up course for Management majors who have taken Strategic Management.  In my early days, I even taught Marketing and Market Research, but I am thankful and confident we now have faculty far better qualified to teach those courses.  And although it is really hard work, I may have the most fun teaching a January-term course on The Blues with my colleague Philip Bryant.

In economics, my primary interests are in policy, so that is where all of my research has been focused.  Getting a little deeper into the policy area, I worked in Washington, D.C. as a policy analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 1990-1992, on leave from Gustavus.  Shortly after returning, I was appointed to the Minnesota Apprenticeship Advisory Council, and served in that role for 15 years.  In 2009, I was appointed to the Minnesota Advisory Council to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for two years.

As you might expect from the Blues course, music is one of my favorite hobbies, along with golf, reading fiction (a weakness for crime novels by Walter Mosley and Elmore Leonard, and more recently, a couple of series by fellow Minnesotan John Sandford), cooking, and watching movies and (mostly older) British and Scandinavian television series now available on DVD and/or streaming.

Courses Taught