Edward Miguel | |
|---|---|
 Miguel in 2015 | |
| Born | Edward Andrew Miguel 1974 (age 50–51) |
| Spouse | Alison Reed |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater |
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| Doctoral advisor | Michael Kremer •Abhijit Banerjee •Alberto Alesina |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Development economics Environmental economics Health economics Political economy |
| Institutions |
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| Doctoral students | Chris Blattman •Manisha Shah •Eva Vivalt •Solomon Hsiang •Suresh Naidu |
| Awards | Frisch Medal (2024) Sloan Fellowship (2005-2007) |
| Website | |
Edward "Ted"Andrew Miguel (born 1974) is an American development economist currently serving as the Distinguished Professor of Economics andOxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. He is the founder and faculty co-director of theCenter for Effective Global Action (CEGA), aBerkeley-based hub for research ondevelopment economics.
Miguel's research focuses oneconomic development, particularly inSub-Saharan Africa. He has pursued projects on the causes and consequences of conflict, the effects of early life health and educational interventions, andresearch transparency in thesocial sciences. AlongsideAbhijit Banerjee,Esther Duflo,Dean Karlan, andMichael Kremer, Miguel has pioneered the use ofrandomized controlled trials and other forms ofimpact evaluation to test the effects of social interventions in the developing world. In 2019, theNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded toAbhijit Banerjee,Esther Duflo, andMichael Kremer for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty", citing Miguel andCEGA as additional actors linking "experimental research to policy change and advice."[1]
Among other honors, Miguel is the recipient of aSloan Research Fellowship and the 2024Frisch Medal and is an elected member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is affiliated with theNational Bureau of Economic Research andBureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development.
Edward Andrew Miguel was born inNew York City[2] in 1974, and raised inNew Jersey.[2] He is the son of Krystyna Miguel, a nutrionist, and Eduardo Miguel, a rheumatologist.[3] He attendedTenafly High School inTenafly, New Jersey, graduating as valedictorian of his class in 1992.[4]
After graduating from high school, Miguel attended theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was aTruman Scholar[5] and graduated in 1996 withS.B. degrees in mathematics and economics.[2] Thereafter, he joinedHarvard University, receiving aPhD in economics in 2000[6] with the support of anNSF Graduate Research Fellowship.[5] His thesis, entitled "Political Economy of Education and Health in Kenya", was supervised byMichael Kremer,Abhijit Banerjee,Alberto Alesina, andLawrence F. Katz, and included an early draft of Kremer and Miguel's evaluation of the Kenya Primary School Deworming Project.[6]
Miguel is the husband of Alison Reed, apediatric endocrinologist at theUniversity of California, San Francisco, whom he married in 2006.[3]
After finishing hisPhD, Miguel joined the faculty of theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where has remained a professor since 2000. Since 2012, he has been the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics; since 2023, he has been the Distinguished Professor of Economics, with joint appointments inUC Berkeley's Department of Economics, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Department of Demography, and Goldman School of Public Policy. Since 2009, he has been a Research Associate of theNational Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7] He was a visiting professor atStanford University during 2007-2008 and a visiting fellow atPrinceton University during 2002–2003.
Miguel is a prolific adviser, and has sat on over 140 dissertation committees while teaching atUC Berkeley.[8] His formers students include economists such asChris Blattman,Manisha Shah,Eva Vivalt, andSuresh Naidu. In 2015, he was awarded the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award fromUC Berkeley for his work mentoring and training PhD students.[8]
In 2008, Miguel founded theCenter for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a research network and funder based atUC Berkeley that supports research in global health and development focused onimpact evaluation. The network currently includes over 160 affiliated faculty atUC Berkeley,Stanford,UCLA,UCSD, and a number of other universities based on thewest coast of the United States. CEGA supports research indevelopment economics that leveragesrandomized controlled trials or other rigorous methods aimed at evaluating the causal effect of interventions on health and well-being inlow and middle income countries. Since 2009, the network has distributed over $52 million in competitive grants, and supported over 535 studies across 57 countries.
In 2012, Miguel founded theBerkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), an academic initiative within theCenter for Effective Global Action aimed at promoting scientific transparency andreproducibility in thesocial sciences.[9] Alongside organizations such as theCenter for Open Science, BITSS creates and disseminates educational resources and tools to promote transparent practices, such as the use of pre-analysis plans, in thesocial sciences.[10] In 2018, for example, BITSS collaborated with theJournal of Development Economics to launch a pre-results review track in the journal in which authors can apply for publication before results are known in an effort to reducepublication biases and eliminatenull result penalties.[11] In line with his work at BITSS, Miguel published a how-to guide entitledTransparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science alongside Garrett Christensen and Jeremy Freese.[12] For its work promoting quality in social research, BITSS was awarded anEinstein Foundation Berlin Institutional Award in 2023.[13]
In 2002, alongside Daniel Posner ofUCLA, Miguel co-founded the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE), an organization ofeconomists,political scientists, andgraduate students in thesocial sciences based on theWest Coast of the United States conducting field research on theAfrican continent.[14] The group has semi-annually meetings, in which members and invited guests present research in progress. Current and former members of the working group include Miguel, Posner,Chris Blattman, Jenny Aker, and Joshua Graff Zivin.[14]
Miguel's research focuses ondevelopment economics andpoverty alleviation, particularly inSub-Saharan Africa. He has pursued research on a range of topics within these fields, including the effects of environmental shocks andextreme weather on conflict and violence,global health,corruption, energy andelectrification, the impacts ofcash transfers, the economy ofaging, and transparency in social science.
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Miguel'sdoctoral thesis was advised byMichael Kremer, an American development economist who later received the 2019Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to developing the "experimental approach toalleviating global poverty." Beginning in the late 1990s, Miguel collaborated with Kremer on arandomized controlled trial aimed at evaluating the direct and spillover effects of a school-baseddeworming program on education and health in ruralKenya. The experiment was inspired by a trip Kremer took to rural Kenya with his wife,Rachel Glennerster, shortly after the completion of his PhD.[15] Therandomized controlled trial involved a total of 32,000 children, and found that administeringdeworming treatments to children reduced rates of school absenteeism by 25%.[16] The study thus estimated thatdeworming could keep children in school for an additional year at a cost of $3.50USD, substantially lower than other interventions such as subsidizing school uniforms or constructing additional schools.[17] The results of the study were published inEconometrica in 2004, and inspired theDeworm the World Initiative, an international campaign which has since 2014 delivered 1.8 billiondeworming treatments to children around the world.[18] For their work, Miguel and Kremer received theKenneth Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association, granted to the best paper inhealth economics written within the previous year.[19]
Miguel and co-authors have published several long-run follow ups of the originaldeworming study.[20][21] In 2020, Miguel released a paper alongside Kremer, Joan Hamory, Michael Walker, and Sarah Baird documenting the long-term effects of the program on earnings, educational attainment, and employment.[22] They find that exposure to additional years of deworming causes a 13% increase in hourly earnings and 14% increase in consumer spending, with large increases as well in the likelihood of working outside agriculture.[22] The effects of the program on earnings were slightly smaller than those observed in a ten-year follow up, but nonetheless suggested the program was highly cost effective, generating a 37% annual rate of return.[22]
In 2013, Miguel and Kremer allowed an independent research team based at theLondon School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to re-evaluate the original dataset and methods used to produce their initial results. The researchers published two re-analyses of Miguel and Kremer's work: a direct replication[23] and a reproduction[24] using alternative statistical methods. They found and documented several errors in the original work, including a substantial amount of missing data and an incorrectly reported claim that school-based deworming reduced anemia in treated children.[25][26] The results of the replications thus coincided with aCochrane review on the benefits ofdeworming,[27] which found little effect on bloodhemoglobin levels.[26] The replications did, however, reinforce the original paper's results on school attendance.[22]
Several academics have called into question the results of the replications, suggesting their methods are unnecessarily unfair.[26]Chris Blattman, then ofColumbia University, observed that "[t]here are clearly serious problems with the [Kenya] Miguel-Kremer study. But, to be quite frank, you have throw so much crazy sh*t at Miguel-Kremer to make the result go away that I believe the result even more than when I started."[26] Despite mixed evidence, charity evaluatorGiveWell continued to recommend funding be allocated todeworming, noting that its low cost would make it highly cost effective if effects do materialize.[28][29] In response to the debate over the legitimacy of Miguel and Kremer's results, several media outlets and academic publications dubbed the controversy the "worm wars".[26][28][29][30]
Miguel has also pursued research alongside Marshall Burke andSolomon Hsiang evaluating the implications ofclimate change for productivity and conflict across countries. This is one of the earliest studies around this topic. In a paper inNature,[31] Miguel, Burke, and Hsiang show using data from across countries that productivity is nonlinear in average temperatures, peaking at 13 degreesCelsius and declining rapidly as temperatures rise.[32] Their results suggest that in aggregate, by 2050climate change may have cost theUnited States economy $5 trillion.[32]
Alongside Burke, John Dykema, Shanker Satyanath, and David Lobell, Miguel also has an article in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[33] showing that historically, the risk ofarmed conflict in a given country inSub-Saharan Africa in a year is strongly correlated with the presence ofextreme temperatures.[34] If historical estimates of the link between battle deaths and temperature are found to persist, they find that standardclimate models suggest that the incidence ofarmed conflict inSub-Saharan Africa may increase by 54% by 2030, representing an additional 393,000 battle deaths per year.[34]
In addition to this cross-country research, Miguel has also pursued research on the effects of weather shocks on crime and conflict in particular settings. Alongside Halvor Mehlum and Ragnar Torvik, Miguel published an article in theJournal of Urban Economics[35] examining the effects of rising crop prices on property crime in 19th centuryBavaria.[36] Usingrainfall as a source of random variation inrye yields, they show that grain prices are strongly correlated with rates of property crime, whichBavaria kept meticulous records of. Therefore, they suggest thatpoverty, hunger, and economic uncertainty may encouragetheft.[36] In a similar spirit, Miguel shows in a paper in theReview of Economic Studies[37] that duringdroughts andfloods, elderly women in ruralTanzania are substantially more likely to be murdered by close relatives, in line with beliefs thatwitchcraft may be responsible for adverse weather.[38]
Miguel has also pursued work on the effects ofunconditional cash transfers. In 2022, Miguel published the results of arandomized controlled trial examining the direct andgeneral equilibrium effects ofunconditional cash transfers on village economies in ruralKenya.[39] The experiment was implemented byGiveDirectly, an internationalNGO, and involved the distribution of over $10 millionUSD in lump-sum transfers to over 10,000 poor households inSiaya County.[16][39] The project was distinguished for evaluating not just the direct effects ofcash transfers on recipient households, but also their indirect effects on non-recipient households residing in the same villages.[39][40] It found thatcash transfers have substantial indirect effects on village economies: every $1USD of cash received by a local economy was associated with a $2.60USD increase in total economy activity,[41] implying afiscal multiplier of 2.6.[39]
Miguel published the results of theGiveDirectly evaluation inEconometrica,[42] alongside co-authors Paul Niehaus, Michael Walker, Dennis Egger, andJohannes Haushofer.[39] The paper received the 2024Frisch Medal, awarded every two years to the best empirical or theoretical article published in the journal within the past five years.[43] Miguel is actively involved in further research on the effects of thecash transfer program, including evaluations of its effects onchild mortality.[44]
Miguel has also pursued research on corruption inlow and middle income countries. Prior to 2002,United Nations diplomats based inNew York City were essentially immune from parking violations, with vehicles ticketed but rarely towed.[45][46] This changed in 2002, when SenatorsHillary Clinton andChuck Schumer ofNew York sponsored an amendment to a foreign aid bill allowingNew York City to recoup unpaid parking tickets from disbursements of foreign aid to select countries.[46] In a 2006 paper withRaymond Fisman, then ofColumbia University, Miguel evaluated the distribution of parking tickets across countries in an effort to shed light on the relative importance of norms and legal enforcement in shapinganti-social behavior and lawfulness.[45][46] Fisman and Miguel found a strong correlation between third-party measures of political corruption and the number of parking tickets accumulated by a country.[45] Diplomats fromSweden,Canada, andJapan had few if any parking violations, while countries such asKuwait,Egypt, andSudan accumulated many.[45] To summarize this and other work, Miguel and Fisman wroteEconomic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations, apopular science book examining the effects ofcorruption andviolence oneconomic development[47] published byPrinceton University Press.[48] In it, they argue for automatically indexingforeign aid toclimate shocks in an effort to preventcivil wars or other outbreaks of violence.[49]
Miguel is among the most productive economists in the world, ranking in the top 300 according toResearch Papers in Economics by total publication output.[50] Several of Miguel's papers fall within the top 1% of economics publications by total accrued citations.[51]
In 2019, theNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded toEsther Duflo,Abhijit Banerjee, andMichael Kremer, Miguel's doctoral supervisor and co-author, for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."[1] The official scientific background for the award cited Miguel andCEGA as key additional actors linking "experimental research to policy change and advice."[1] In recognition of his work with Kremer, Miguel attended theNobel Prize award ceremony inStockholm.[52]
