Fiscal economist Nancy Hays Teeters (1930-) was born in Marion, Indiana to Mabel Drake and S. Edgar Hays. She received the 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 D. Teeters (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 (1958-), James (1961-), and John (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 L. Schultze, Edward R. Fried, and Alice M. Rivlin 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 macro-economics forecasting of U.S. and foreign economies as well as micro-economics 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.
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