Michael Kremer | |
|---|---|
 Kremer in 2020 | |
| Born | Michael Robert Kremer (1964-11-12)November 12, 1964 (age 60) New York City, U.S.[1] |
| Spouse | Rachel Glennerster |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater |
|
| Thesis | Two Essays on Economic Growth (1992) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Barro •Eric Maskin •Greg Mankiw |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Development economics Health economics |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | Edward Miguel •Seema Jayachandran •Karthik Muralidharan •Nava Ashraf •Benjamin Olken •Dina Pomeranz •Emily Oster •Asim Ijaz Khwaja |
| Notable ideas | O-ring theory of economic development •Randomized controlled trials |
| Awards | Nobel Prize in Economics (2019) MacArthur Fellowship (1997) |
| Website | |
Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964)[2] is an Americandevelopment economist currently serving as university professor in economics at theUniversity of Chicago and director of the Development Innovation Lab at theBecker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.[3][4] Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies atHarvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020.[4] In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded theNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together withEsther Duflo andAbhijit Banerjee,[5] "for their experimental approach toalleviating global poverty."[6]
In addition to his academic appointments, Kremer is the co-founder of theBureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),[4] a member of theNational Academy of Sciences,[4] and a Research Associate at theNational Bureau of Economic Research.[7] In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of theEconometric Society.[3] Kremer is also the Scientific Director of Development Innovation Ventures,[4] a program of theUnited States Agency for International Development aimed at maximizing the impact of development spending through rigorous impact evaluation.[8]
Michael Robert Kremer was born on November 12, 1964[2] to Eugene and Sara Lillian (née Kimmel) Kremer[9] inNew York City.[10] Both his mother and father were the children of Jewish immigrants, fromPoland and Austria-Poland, respectively.[9] His father taughtarchitecture atKansas State University, and his mother was a professor ofEnglish at the same institution, where she specialized in American Jewish and Holocaust literature.[9] Kremer attendedManhattan High School inManhattan, Kansas, where his mother was formerly a teacher.[11] Beginning in fifth grade, he took classes atKansas State University, taking enough credits to achieve sophomore standing by his junior year of high school.[12]
He left high school a year early to attendHarvard University,[11] where he received hisAB inSocial Studies in 1985,magna cum laude andPhi Beta Kappa.[13] Kremer wrote his senior thesis comparing an employment guarantee program inIndia with a food subsidy scheme inSri Lanka.[14]
After graduating fromHarvard, Kremer worked for a year as a teacher and administrator at Eshisiru Secondary School inKakamega District ofKenya.[15] Inspired by the experience, he co-foundedWorldTeach,[10] aCambridge-basednonprofit organization focused on international development and education,[16] where he currently serves as President of the Board.[13] After his time inKenya, Kremer returned toHarvard University, where he received aPhD in Economics in 1992.[2] Kremer's dissertation research was supervised byRobert Barro,Eric Maskin, andGreg Mankiw, and focused on the determinants of long-run economic growth.[17] His PhD research was supported by a fellowship from theNational Science Foundation,[13][18] and won the David A. Wells Prize, awarded annually to the best dissertation in theHarvard Department of Economics.[13]
Kremer is the husband ofRachel Glennerster,[10] president of theCenter for Global Development, an associate professor of economics at theUniversity of Chicago, and the former Chief Economist of the UKDepartment for International Development.[19]
Kremer began his academic career at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as a postdoctoral fellow from 1992 to 1993.[13] He was a visiting assistant professor at theUniversity of Chicago in spring 1993, and joinedMIT as an assistant professor the same year.[13] He was promoted to associate professor in 1996, and again to professor of economics in 1998.[13] In 1999, he joinedHarvard University, where he served as Gates Professor of Developing Societies from 2003 to 2020.[4] After his time atHarvard, Kremer again joined theUniversity of Chicago, where he is a university professor in economics and director of the Development Innovation Lab at theBecker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.[4]
In addition to his academic appointments, Kremer is a fellow of theEconometric Society,[3] a member of theNational Academy of Sciences,[20] and a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[21] In 2002, he co-founded theBureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development,[4] a non-profit learned society promoting research on themicroeconomics of development. Since 1999, Kremer has also been a research associate at theNational Bureau of Economic Research.[7]
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According toResearch Papers in Economics, Kremer is among the most cited economists in the world, ranking in the top 130 authors by total research output as of November 2023.[22] He has focused his research oneconomic growth and poverty alleviation, particularly as it relates to education and health. AlongsideAbhijit Banerjee andEsther Duflo, Kremer has helped establish the effectiveness ofrandomized controlled trials to test proposed antipoverty measures.[23] Describing Kremer's early use of pioneering experimental methods, Duflo said that Kremer "was there from the very beginning, and took enormous risks. [...] He is a visionary."[24]
Inspired by arandomized evaluation co-authored withEdward Miguel showing substantial effects of school-based deworming programs on educational attainment and health,[25] Kremer co-founded theDeworm the World Initiative,[26] which has since 2014 delivered 1.8 billion treatments to children around the world.[27] The scheme, run by non-profitEvidence Action, was ranked aGiveWell top charity from 2013 to 2022, considered among the best in the world for social impact per marginal dollar spent.[28] Since 2009, Kremer has been a member ofGiving What We Can, aneffective altruism organization whose members pledge to give 10% or more of their lifetime income to effective charities.[29]
In 2010, Kremer co-founded Development Innovation Ventures, an evidence based innovation fund administered byUSAID aimed at testing and scaling new approaches to poverty alleviation.[30][31] The program promotes aventure capital approach to development finance, prioritizing rapid distribution of grants and scale-up of policies successful in pilot stages.[8] Since its founding, DIV has funded 277 grants in 49 countries,[32] generating an estimated $17 in social benefit for each dollar invested in the program.[31]
From 2011 to 2014, Kremer co-led an experimental evaluation of anSMS-based information service in whichKenyan smallholder farmers were texted agricultural advice.[33] The program increased yields by 8%,[33] inspiring Kremer to co-foundPrecision Development (PxD), a non-profit organization building digital information services for the world's poor.[34][35] In 2020, PxD's programs had 5.7 million users, at an average cost per user of $1.61.[36]
Kremer has also pursued research on vaccine development and financing. He developed an interest in the subject after contracting malaria while traveling in Kenya.[37] In a 2004 book with his wife,Rachel Glennerster,[38] Kremer advocates for the creation ofadvance market commitments, in which governments enter into legally binding agreements with pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, promising to purchase given quantities of vaccines or medications provided they meet certain benchmarks for safety and efficacy.[39] In response to Kremer's research, a consortium of donors including theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation and national governments such as Canada, Italy, and Norway pledged $1.5 billion as anadvance market commitment forpneumococcal vaccines.[10] TheAMC has inspired the creation of three different vaccinations, which have collectively immunized 150 million children.[40]
Kremer's research was also widely cited during theCOVID-19 pandemic as a model for how to quickly develop vaccines through public-private partnership. In response to requests for consultation by several governments, Kremer founded the Accelerating Health Technologies Group,[10][40] a consortium of academics including Glennerster,Susan Athey, andJonathan Levin aimed at accelerating the wide-scale distribution of effective vaccines.[41] The group advised theUS government onOperation Warp Speed,[10] a public-private partnership announced in 2020 that funded successful COVID-19 vaccines such as those developed byPfizer–BioNTech andModerna.Chris Blattman, a professor at theHarris School of Public Policy, has described Kremer as one of the world's "leading thinkers on incentives for creating new vaccine research."[10]
Kremer's research focuses oneconomic growth and poverty alleviation, particularly as it relates tohealth andeducation. Along withAbhijit Banerjee andEsther Duflo, he is a leading proponent of the use ofrandomized controlled trials indevelopment economics, a contribution recognized by the 2019Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.[2]
Kremer's dissertation research examined the determinants of long-run economic growth. Among his earliest contributions was theO-ring theory of economic development,[18] named for theSpace Shuttle Challenger disaster, in which a cascading failure was caused by the malfunctioning of a single small component.[42] Kremer's insight was that complex products (like the space shuttle) often require completing many steps correctly for the final product to have any value.[43] Kremer suggested this would make high-skilled workerscomplements to each other, meaning wages for high-skilled workers will be higher in an economic environment where other workers are also highly skilled.[44] TheO-ring theory has been recognized as a leading explanation forhuman capital flight[45] and cross-country wage inequality.[46][44] The framework has also been extended by other scholars, who have incorporated into the model "non O-ring" sectors without skill complementarities.[46]
Kremer's work on theO-ring theory was inspired by his time inKenya, when he organized a training session forWorldTeach volunteers, but forgot to purchase toilet paper for the event.[37] The experience demonstrated how even small failures can derail a larger enterprise, such that production processes often require many complementary high-skilled workers to succeed.[37]
During his graduate studies, Kremer also pursued research on the link between population growth and technological change. In a paper inThe Quarterly Journal of Economics,[47] Kremer empirically tests the hypotheses of macroeconomic models predicting a positive relationship between population levels and technological innovation because of thenon-rivalry of ideas.[48] He shows that among societies with no technological contact and similar levels of productivity, those with higher populations saw faster improvements in technology.[49]
In other theoretical work, Kremer studies the optimal policy responses to species endangerment. In a paper with Charles Morcom in theAmerican Economic Review,[50] Kremer argues that because the price of ivory is positively associated with poachers’ incentives to kill endangered elephants, governments should accumulate stockpiles of ivory, releasing them onto the open market when elephant populations reach dangerous levels.[37][51] He argues that doing so can counteract increased incentives to poach, thereby preventing species endangerment.[37][51]
The policy value of Kremer and Morcom's work was criticized by Erwin H. Bulte and co-authors, who argue in a reply in theAmerican Economic Review that government ownership of ivory may incentivize the preemptive extermination of endangered species, thereby allowing stores to be legally sold underCITES.[52] They propose instead that stores of ivory are managed by intergovernmental conservation organizations who do not face the same incentives as governments to maximize revenues in the short-term.[52]
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Among Kremer's most recognized work examines the effects ofdeworming treatments on the health and educational outcomes of children. After completing hisPhD, Kremer traveled withRachel Glennerster toKenya on vacation, where he met a friend from his time as a teacher and administrator.[14] The friend was planning on rolling out a new scheme to help elementary school children that included the distribution of deworming medication.[14][53] Kremer recommended that the scheme be implemented in a random order, such that the effects of treatment could be evaluated rigorously, as in arandomized clinical trial.[53] Treatments were rolled out in 1998, and the results of the study were eventually published inEconometrica by Kremer andEdward Miguel, hisPhD student, in 2004.[25] The experiment found large effects ofdeworming on health and education outcomes, with a reduction in school absenteeism of 25%.[53][54] The program's success sparked theDeworm the World Initiative, which has since 2014 delivered 1.8 billiondeworming treatments to children around the world.[27]
In 2021, Kremer and Miguel published a long-term follow up of the initialdeworming program in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[55] showing that those who received an extra two to three years of deworming treatment as a child have consumer spending that is 14% higher than their counterparts ten years later.[56] They also find thatdeworming increases the likelihood of living in an urban area, and decreases the likelihood of working in agriculture (a sector with generally lower wages and less capacity for growth).[56]
Another strand of Kremer's work concerns public sector absenteeism in the developing world, particularly in public education and health systems. In work withKarthik Muralidharan,Jeffrey Hammer, Halsey Rogers, and Nazmul Chaudhury,[57] Kremer shows via unannounced visits to Indian public schools that teacher absenteeism sits at 25%, varying from 15% inMaharashtra to 42% inJharkhand.[58] Subsequent research has estimated the salary cost of this absenteeism at $1.5 billion per year in India.[58][59]
In wider work coveringBangladesh,Ecuador,India,Indonesia,Peru, andUganda,[60] Kremer and co-authors show that health worker absenteeism averages 35% across countries.[61] Their work has inspired randomized evaluations of several novel policy solutions to public sector absenteeism, such as camera[62] and mobile phone based[63] monitoring schemes.
Kremer has also pursued research on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. He and Rachel Glennerster have been leading proponents ofadvance market commitments, legally binding agreements in which governments agree to purchase a given quantity of a vaccine or other item at a profitable price, provided it meets certain standards for efficacy and safety.[39][64] Kremer promoted the idea in a 2004 book,[38][39] in addition to a widely cited 2003 report published by theCenter for Global Development.[65]
In a 2020 working paper,[66] Kremer,Jonathan Levin, and Christopher Tucker review the economic case forAMCs, showing theoretically that they can effectively prevent thehold-up problem that emerges when pharmaceutical firms cannot bargain on prices until after vaccines or other drugs are developed.[67]Advance market commitments have been suggested as a means of spurring investment across a wide variety of industries, including pharmaceuticals,[39] carbon removal,[68][69] and renewable energy.[70]
Kremer is among the most citeddevelopment economists, ranking in the top 130 economists in the world by total research output according toResearch Papers in Economics.[22] TheOpen Syllabus Project ranks him as the 28th most cited author on the syllabi of university economics courses.[71] In 2006, he received aScientific American 50 Award, awarded to influencers from research, business, and politics with "an interest in leading technological innovation as a force for the public good."[72]
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In 2019, Kremer was chosen as the co-winner of theNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along withEsther Duflo andAbhijit Banerjee ofMIT[2] "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."[6] Speaking of Kremer, Duflo, and Banerjee's work popularizing the use ofrandomized controlled trials in development economics, the Nobel committee noted that the "[t]heir experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics."[6] In a tribute to Kremer,Berkeley professorEdward Miguel notes that "Michael’s pioneering work also accelerated innovation in original data collection in development and made it normal and even downright necessary for development economists to spend extended time in the societies that they study."[73]Amartya Sen, aHarvard based economist and winner of the 1998Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, stressed that Kremer "has made an outstanding contribution in combining economic theory and sophisticated empirical techniques and applying it to critical policy issues in development economics."[74]
Kremer'sNobel lecture, entitled "Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics" provides an overview of the experimental revolution indevelopment economics, arguing thatRCTs can be a powerful tool for influencing public policy and promoting innovation.[75] To do this, he draws on many examples of his own work, including that ondeworming and fertilizer usage.[75]
Kremer, Duflo, and Banerjee donated the winnings associated with their prize to the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, aUniversity of Chicago based grant-making body supporting frontier research in development economics.[76] Writing of their decision to do so, Kremer noted that "Abhijit, Esther and I truly believe that our Nobel Prize is an award for the development economics community, and we wanted to invest it in a way that provides new opportunities for research."[77]
Agriculture
including the Prize Lecture December 8, 2019Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics
