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Who We Are

The Office of Tax Policy Research, established at the University of Michigan Business School in 1987, has two missions. The first is to encourage and facilitate joint research on the tax system by economists and scholars of other disciplines. The second is to serve as a liaison on tax issues among the academic, business, and policymaking tax communities. The Office draws on the substantial data resources and expertise already existing at the University of Michigan in these fields, and also involves scholars from outside the University.

 

Musgrave Fellowship

University of Michigan doctoral students contribute importantly to the performance of OTPR's mission. Consequently, OTPR offers annually a special fellowship designed to attract to Michigan and support outstanding graduate students interested in pursuing public finance as a field. This fellowship is the Richard A. Musgrave Fellowship, named in honor of one of the leading figures of twentieth century public finance, who wrote his most influential book while a professor at Michigan.

The fellowship supplements other support offered by the University and the economics department with a guaranteed research assistantship in the first and second summers of the Musgrave's Fellow's residence at Michigan. The goal is to enhance graduate training with early participation in research projects.

Richard A. Musgrave was born in 1910 in Königstein, Germany. He received a Diplom Volkswirt from Heidelberg University in 1933, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1936 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1937. He was an instructor and tutor at Harvard from 1936-1941. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he served as an Economist in the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Board from 1939-1948. In 1948-49 he was a lecturer at Swarthmore College, and in 1949 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he was Professor of Economics.

Professor Musgrave taught at Michigan for nine years. During his Michigan years he wrote his revolutionary The Theory of Public Finance, 1959, which changed the way future generations of public finance students conceptualize the key questions in this field. As the work proceeded, subsequent chapters were discussed in his seminar, encouraging his students to undertake future work in public finance. During his years at Michigan, Professor Musgrave also published scores of articles and Congressional testimonies. A study on tax incidence, published jointly with members of his seminar, was honored recently as the most widely cited article ever published in the National Tax Journal.

Information for potential applicants for the Musgrave Fellowship is available by clicking here.
 
 
 Public Finance Seminars
The Office co-sponsors, together with the University of Michigan Department of Economics, a seminar series featuring leading academic experts in taxation. OTPR also sponsors a weekly brown-bag lunchtime seminar for informal presentations of work in progress by Michigan faculty and students.