Nancy Hays Teeters Papers

Collection

Identifier: RG 30-169

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The papers of Nancy Hays Teeters (1930-), spanning four decades, document the development of Teeters' career as a fiscal economist from professional staffer and research scholar (1957-78) to member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1978-84), a Presidential appointment. She concluded her career as IBM's Director of Economics (1984-90) and Vice President (1986-90). Although the papers are largely professional in nature, providing little information about Teeters' personal life, they reveal their subject to be a woman of mental agility and toughness who derived great satisfaction from her work. Her correspondence, writings, and speeches display the rare ability to marshall technical expertise to promote the common good. They also document the nation's changing economic priorities over a thirty year period.

The personal papers, arranged in five subgroups, follow for the most part the chronology of Teeters' career. The exception is Subgroup I, Personal Files, 1950-85, which brings together diverse biographical materials. The other subgroups are: Federal Government Service (1960-74); U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee, Chief Economist (1974-78); Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System (1978-84); and Director of Economics and Vice President, IBM (1984-90). Within the subgroups, records are arranged in series alphabetically by type of document. Within the series, the records are typically arranged in either alphabetical or chronological order.

Teeters' early career (1960-74) began with her appointment as a research scholar for the Government Finance Section of the Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System (1960-66), with subsequent employment at the Brookings Institution (1970-73) and the Congressional Research Service (1973-74). Files evenly document her early and continuing interest in social security reform. Teeters' acknowledged expertise on the federal budget is manifested by her collaboration with Charles L. Schultze, Edward R. Fried, and Alice M. Rivlin at Brookings on Setting National Priorities (Brookings, 1972-74); this three volume series is housed in Series 4, Publications, Subgroup II, together with nine volumes of the series Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (1970-72) to which Teeters contributed. A complete listing of Teeters' publications can be found in Appendix I of this finding guide. Several volumes of U.S. Government Printing Office publications, including Budget Committee Resolutions, and hearings (1971-78) document Teeters' work as Chief Economist for the U.S. House Committee on the Budget, the position she held when nominated to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve by President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

The bulk of the collection relates to Teeters' service as a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1978-84). As a Governor, Teeters was a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which alone made decisions affecting the open market. The nine volumes of annual reports (1978-83) of the Board of Governors provide a thorough account of FOMC monetary policies and reflect contemporary debate at the Federal Reserve over such issues as monetarism, bank deregulation, and the international debt crisis. Teeters' chronological and correspondence files for this period (1978-84), housed in 34 folders, supplement the official publications, providing evidence of her wide-ranging contacts with leading economists, senators, and government officials. Proof of her independence as a thinker is to be found in her "Statements of Dissent" from the majority of the Board of Governors as well as in her speeches and Congressional testimony.

A small but growing body of material relates to Teeters' post-government employment at IBM as Director of Economics (1984-90) and Vice President (1986-90) in which Teeters supervised both national and international economic forecasting.

Dates

Creation: 1950 - 1990
Creation: Majority of material found within 1960 - 1990
Other: Date acquired: 1984 June 27

Conditions Governing Access

Unrestricted.

Biographical Sketch

Fiscal economist Nancy Hays Teeters (1930-2014) was born in Marion, Indiana to Samuel Edgar (1891-1950) and Mabel Irene Drake Hays (1896-1983). She had two older brothers, William Harrison (1926-1931) and James Edgar (b. 1927). She received a B.A. in economics from Oberlin College in 1952 and the M.A. in economics from the University of Michigan in 1954. While working towards the doctorate, she taught economics for the University of Maryland's overseas division in Stuttgart, West Germany (1955-56), and for the University of Michigan (1956-57).

In 1957, Nancy Teeters and her husband, Robert Duane Teeters (1928-2008, A.B. Oberlin 1950; M.S. Yale 1952) took jobs with the federal government in Washington. From 1957 to 1966, Nancy Teeters served as a staff economist for the Federal Reserve Board's Government Finance Section where she estimated federal receipts, expenditures, and ownership of the national debt. During this period, Teeters raised her three children, Ann (b. 1958), James (b. 1961), and John (b. 1964). In 1962, the Board of Governors loaned her for a year to the President's Council of Economic Advisors. \ She returned to the Board's staff in 1963 as the in-house expert on the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut proposal. Three years later, she became a Fiscal Economist with the Planning and Analysis staff of the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget), where she was the Bureau's representative on the interagency committee in charge of economic forecasting.

Teeters joined the Brookings Institution as a research associate in 1970; a year later, she was named a senior fellow. In each of her three years at Brookings, she co-authored with Charles Louis Schultze (1924-2016), Edward R. Fried (1918-2011), and Alice Mitchell Rivlin (1931-2019) the Brookings studies, Setting National Priorities, highly regarded analyses of the Federal budget. She left Brookings in 1973 to become Senior Specialist in the Federal Budget, a new position in the Economics Division of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service.

In December 1974, Teeters joined the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Budget as its chief economist. She provided the economic forecast for the Budget Resolutions, for evaluating the economic impact of various Congressional proposals, for calculating receipts, and for estimating the effect of the Budget Resolution on the national debt.

President Jimmy Carter nominated Nancy Hays Teeters in August 1978 to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; sworn in on 18 September 1978, she became the first woman to sit on the Board in the history of the Federal Reserve. As a Member of the Board, she was, by law, a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee and therefore directly involved in the formulation and execution of American monetary policy.

In July 1984, Teeters joined IBM as Director of Economics; in March 1986, she became the second woman to be named a Vice President at IBM. She supervised the preparation of macroeconomics forecasting of U.S. and foreign economies as well as microeconomics forecasting for the entire computer industry. She developed her knowledge of computers, maintaining a special interest in their applications to banking. Nancy Hays Teeters retired from IBM on August 1, 1990 at the age of sixty.

Note written by Valerie S. Komor.

Extent

10.05 Linear Feet

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Method of Acquisition

The papers of Nancy Hays Teeters were received by the Oberlin College Archives under a deed of gift from Nancy Hays Teeters. They arrived in three separate lots in 1984, 1989, and 1990.