The Harrison Metal Award and Fellowships were created to recognize the importance of economic history in understanding the development of the economy and wishes to advance this field of study. This fund aims to attract graduate students with high potential to study economic history, of promoting research and scholarship in the field to set the students up for professional success, and raising the profile of economic history at the University of Michigan.
2024 Winners
Robert Kaplan
Robert Kaplan is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Michigan with interests in economic history, development economics, and macroeconomics. Before coming to Michigan, Robert worked as a macroeconomics research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His research interests focus on the historical interactions between economic growth,demographic change, and structural transformation, while offering insights for contemporarydevelopment. He graduated from Tufts University in 2022 with a B.A. in Quantitative Economics and History.
Emma LaGuardia
Emma LaGuardia is an incoming PhD student in Economics at the University of Michigan. She graduated from Miami University (OH) in 2022 with a BA in Economics and Spanish and an MA in Economics. Emma is interested in labor economics, economic history, and the economics of education. Her past research includes an undergraduate thesis titled “Rationalizing Trends in Assortative Mating over the Early20th-Century United States” and a master’s thesis titled “The Community College Expansion Period: A Historical Perspective on Accessible Higher Education.”Previously, Emma was a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
