Welcome to the Department of Economics

A Message from the Chair

Our Department has a long and distinguished history. Economics was one of the original 13 professorships included in the territorial law of 1817 that established the University of Michigania. Its origins date from when economics was first being established as a separate academic discipline in this country, with the first instructor appointed in 1880 and the first Ph.D. granted in 1890. Some of the great names in American economics have passed through our halls as professors, such as Henry Carter Adams (president and founder of the American Economics Association), Richard Musgrave (founder of the modern study of public economics), Lawrence Klein (who, while at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics), and Hal Varian (now chief economist at Google).

The Department today continues this tradition of excellence. More