Department of Economics

Anusha Chari is a Professor of Economics and Finance and Director of the Modern Indian Studies Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s International Finance and Macroeconomics Program, and a research fellow at the Reserve Bank of India. She received a PhD in International Finance from UCLA and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College at Oxford and Economics at the University of Delhi. She has held faculty positions at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the University of Michigan, and The Haas School of Business at Berkeley. She was a research associate at the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance at St. Gallen, Switzerland and a summer intern at the International Monetary Fund. Professor Chari was a special advisor to the Indian Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and member of an Advisory Group of Eminent Persons on G20 Issues. Her research is in the fields of open-economy macroeconomics and international finance.

Jane Cooley Fruehwirth is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an affiliate of UNC’s Carolina Population Center. She had the pleasure of working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Cambridge, prior to coming to UNC. She received her PhD at Duke and her BA at the College of William and Mary. She participated in the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development’s Faculty Success Program and Mid-Career Program, and found it to be game-changing for her. It also helped give her the tools to become a better advocate for women in the profession.

She specializes in the economics of education and social economics. She has always been fascinated with the role peer effects can play in exacerbating inequality or how peers can be exploited to improve student outcomes! Most recently, this has manifested in some research with colleagues on the role of teachers in shaping peer spillovers. More recently, she has begun moving from my focus on achievement to tackling questions around mental health in adolescence with colleagues. She is particularly interested in the role schools can play in combatting the growing mental health crisis among adolescents.

As a health economist, Dr. Gilleskie studies the economic behavior of individuals as it relates to their health. Her research interests are a mixture of health economics, labor economics, and applied econometrics. The work generally involves analyses of observations over time using theory-driven modeling of dynamic behaviors and rigorous empirical approaches to explore health and labor supply decisions and outcomes of individuals. Her work offers contributions in the following applied areas: 1.) the effects of health insurance characteristics on medical care utilization and health behaviors (e.g., to what extent does health insurance coverage of prescription drugs affect utilization of physician and hospital care both contemporaneously and dynamically through changes in health?); 2.) the effects of health and health insurance on employment/education behaviors and outcomes (e.g., to what extent would employment decisions be altered by the introduction of mandatory retiree health insurance coverage by employers?); and 3.) the effects of medical and non-medical choices on health and health behaviors (e.g., should policies to promote better health target medical care use or lifestyles?).

She is currently serving as chair of the Economics Department, having been a faculty member at UNC-CH for 25 years. She recently served as President of the Southern Economic Association. In 2016, she received UNC’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction. She has advised 28 Ph.D. students, 22 MS students, and 15 undergraduate honors thesis students. She is currently a fellow of the Carolina Population Center and the International Association for Applied Econometrics.

Dr. Vaidyanathan’s teaching interest is in International Economics and Economic Development.

Dr. Weber is an environmental economist studying energy, equity, and policy. She uses methods in applied microeconomics and industrial organization to answer research questions in energy and the environment. Her research studies energy and electricity markets, climate change policy, urban economics, distributional impacts of environmental policy, and industry responses to environmental regulation.

Dr. Weber received her Ph.D. in Environmental Economics from Yale University in 2019. She also earned a M.ESc. and a M.Phil. in Environmental Economics from Yale, and a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrialized Societies and Music from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UNC, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has professional experiences in the electricity industry, federal government, and non-governmental research organizations, all of which inform and motivate her research agenda.