Thomas E. Hall was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up in the suburb of Royal Oak. He attended the University of Colorado as an undergraduate, and was a graduate student at the University of California - Santa Barbara where he received his MA and PhD in Economics. He has been an economics professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio since 1982 and teaches classes on macroeconomics, business cycles, and the Great Depression. He has written several articles in applied macroeconomics, and authored Business Cycles: The Nature and Causes of Economic Fluctuations (Praeger, 1990); The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (University of Michigan Press, 1998, with J.D. Ferguson); The Rotten Fruits of Economic Controls and the Rise From the Ashes, 1965-1989 (University Press of America, 2003); Aftermath: The Unintended Consequences of Public Policies (Cato Institute, forthcoming 2014). In addition, he has written two novels, The Quadrangle (2003) and Tapper Jones (2013). He lives in Wyoming, Ohio with his wife Chris. They have one adult son.