Paul joined the Department of Economics faculty in 1956 as an instructor, having received his BA from the University of Texas, his MA from Columbia University, and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. He spent his entire career at Michigan State, being promoted to full professor in 1963, and retiring in 1995.
Paul was a prolific researcher, publishing over half a dozen books and close to 100 articles. Paul’s training in economics led him to adopt what was then called an “institutionalist” approach to his research, which in Paul’s case meant that he was fully familiar with mainstream economics and its mathematical modes of analysis, but was always attentive to the social and historical context of whatever topic he was analyzing, and open to making use of insights from other social science disciplines.
His earliest research was on the historical impact of technological change in the manufacturing industry, but he soon developed an interest in the problems of non-industrialized societies, and by the mid -1960s was regarded as a development economist. His interests remained broad throughout his life, but he was best known as an expert on housing and the residential construction industries in less developed countries. His projects often involved the collection of data in the field, for which he received financial support from such agencies as the Ford Foundation, USAID, and the World Bank. As a result of this work, Paul came to appreciate the value of small private enterprises and entrepreneurship in the process of economic development, but argued that for such productive market behavior to emerge in a country required an appropriate pre-existing institutional framework.
Paul taught a wide range of courses during his time at Michigan State, and directed the dissertations of a number of Ph.D. students. In 1960, he organized the department’s first graduate sequence in development economics, a sequence in which he taught for decades. After his retirement, he established a fellowship to help promising economics graduate students pursue their degrees. Economics faculty members who worked with Paul also remember his dry wit, which enlivened many a lunchroom conversation.