In 1892, the regents appointed Fred M. Taylor assistant professor of political economy, making him the second professor in the department (Henry Carter Adams being the first). In 1921, Taylor was appointment as successor to Adams (who had retired) as department chair. Taylor served as chair from 1921-1924. Taylor’s textbook Principles of Economics would have nine editions between 1911 and 1925. He retired in 1929.The Fred M. Taylor Fellowship in Economic Theory is a highly competitive award program that covers tuition for three terms, GradCare health insurance, and a stipend. For the purpose of this award, "Economic Theory" is to be interpreted broadly. There is one recipient of this departmental award every other year.
Recipient:
Winter 2026 Recipient: Aneesha Parvathaneni
Aneesha Parvathaneni is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on economic development with particular interests in industrial policy, structural transformation and political economy. Her job market paper examines policy complementarity in industrial policy in the context of a large-scale dairy intervention program in India. Exploiting newly digitized data, she examines whether coordinated policy interventions affect economic outcomes and structural transformation, and how these effects vary by gender and income.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Aneesha worked as a Tobin Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University where she assisted faculty on projects studying retirement plans and projects exploiting machine learning algorithms as natural experiments. Prior to that, she served as a Research Associate at J-PAL South Asia, assisting with field experiments on social networks and information sharing in rural India. Originally from Vijayawada, India, she holds an MSc Economics from the London School of Economics and BA (Honours) in Economics from the University of Delhi.
