| Born | 1974 |
|---|---|
| Nationality | United States |
| Institution | University of California, Berkeley |
| Field | Development economics Health economics Political economy |
| Alma mater | Harvard University MIT |
| Influences | Michael Kremer |
Edward Miguel is an American economist and is currently Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is founder and faculty director of the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at U.C. Berkeley.
His work focuses on African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; and interactions between health, education, and productivity for the poor. Along with colleagues, such as Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo, Dean Karlan and Abhijit Banerjee, he has pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials and other rigorous evaluation methods to test the impact of development interventions in the field.
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Miguel earned degrees in Economics and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, where he was a Truman Scholar. In 2000 he completed a PhD in economics at Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.
Miguel is currently professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000. Previously he was a visiting professor at Stanford University and a visiting fellow at Princeton University.
Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer published groundbreaking research in 2004[1] on school-based mass deworming in Kenya using rigorous evaluation methods to test the impact of poverty reduction programs.[2] Their findings that deworming was a cost-effective way to improve school attendance and community health led to the establishment of Deworm the World, a non-profit that works directly with governments and other partners to expand school-based deworming worldwide. The efforts of Deworm the World, together with the results of Miguel and Kremer’s research, were instrumental in the creation of a Kenyan national deworming program in 2009. That year the program reached more than 3.6 million children at 8,200 schools across the country, making it one of the first evidence-based, national deworming programs in sub-Saharan Africa.
This research has been covered multiple times by the New York Times,[3][4][5] as well as by the Boston Globe,[6] and the Chicago Tribune.[7] In May 2011, Miguel and Kremer’s work was featured in a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof on the importance of impact evaluation.[8]
Miguel and co-authors Shankar Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti published a seminal 2004 research article that used annual variation in rainfall to estimate the impact of economic conditions on civil war in sub-Saharan Africa.[9] The study shows that a 5% drop in economic growth increases the likelihood of a civil conflict the following year by more than one half, suggesting that adverse economic conditions can trigger civil conflict.
Miguel and Raymond Fisman published a study in 2006 comparing the number of parking violations per UN diplomat in New York to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.[10] The results, which were covered in the Economist[11] and Forbes,[12] found a strong correlation between political corruption and parking tickets, highlighting the role of cultural norms and legal enforcement in corruption.
Miguel is the author, together with Fisman, of the 2008 book “Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations”[13][14] (Princeton University Press), which was released in paperback in 2010 and has been published in translation in Chinese, Farsi and German.
His research has been funded through grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Science Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, among other agencies.
In 2008, Miguel founded the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA), a network of researchers from across the University of California who evaluate solutions to global development challenges. Miguel currently serves as CEGA’s faculty director.