 He worked in the Division of Statistical Standards of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget coordinating the government programs that collected accounting statistics; his 1945 paper describing his wartime activities was the first recipient of an award from the American Institute of Accountants for the best paper of the year.Cooper began his academic career with a brief teaching stint, from 1944 to 1946, back at the University of Chicago.In 1945, Cooper married his wife Ruth, a lawyer and human activist, and in 1946 he joined the newly formed Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University).