Disinguished Alumni Award - Academia & Government

Elizabeth Bailey M.S. ’66

Elizabeth E. Bailey M.S. ’66 Hon. D. Eng. ’00 is the John C. Hower Professor Emeritus of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania. She has focused her research on economic regulation and deregulation, market structure and corporate governance. Bailey joined Wharton in July 1991 and served as Chair of the Department of Business and Public Policy before retiring in 2010.

Prior to Wharton, she served as a professor and dean of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University.  She was a visiting scholar at the Yale School of Organization and Management and was a trustee at the prestigious Brookings Institution for 26 years.

The embodiment of trailblazing, Bailey was the first female doctoral candidate in economics at Princeton University. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed her as the first female commissioner of the Civil Aeronautics Board, where she played an instrumental role in the deregulation of the U.S. airline industry. Previously, from 1960-77, she worked at Bell Laboratories, first as a computer programmer and later as head of the Economics Research Department.  Bailey was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997.