Edward Miguel

Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel (born 1974) is an American development economist currently serving as the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a Berkeley-based hub for research on development economics.

Miguel's research focuses on economic development, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

He has pursued projects on the causes and consequences of conflict, the effects of early life health and educational interventions, and research transparency in the social sciences.

Alongside Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Dean Karlan, and Michael Kremer, Miguel has pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials and other forms of impact evaluation to test the effects of social interventions in the developing world.

Miguel attended Tenafly High School in Tenafly, New Jersey, from which he graduated as the valedictorian of the class of 1992.

He earned S.B. 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 with a thesis entitled Political Economy of Education and Health in Kenya under the supervision of Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee, Alberto Alesina, and Lawrence F. Katz where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

Miguel has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley since 2000.

He is also a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has been an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Development Economics, and a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

His research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, USAID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, among others.

In 2002, Miguel co-founded the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE), a network of US and Africa-based researchers that meet bi-annually to provide structured feedback on in-progress research papers related to the theme of African political economy.

In 2004, Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer published the results of an impact evaluation on school-based deworming in Kenya.

They determined that deworming is a cost-effective way to increase school attendance rates and improve community health.

Their findings helped lead to the establishment of Deworm the World, a non-profit that works directly with governments and other organizations to expand school-based deworming worldwide in the following capacities: policy and advocacy with governments; prevalence surveying and mapping; program planning and management; public awareness and mobilization; monitoring and evaluation; training and distribution cascade; drug management and coordination.

Deworm the World and the government initiatives it supports have treated over 280 million children in Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

Subsequent work has shown long-term positive impacts of deworming on labor market outcomes, including new research that shows children who received an additional 2 to 3 years of deworming earn higher wages, have higher household consumption and are more likely to live in urban areas.

Their research was covered by several news outlets including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and Vox.

This included a piece by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times on the importance of impact evaluations in determining policy.

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 the civil war in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study shows that a 5 percent negative growth shock increases the likelihood of civil conflict the following year by more than one half, suggesting that economic conditions are a critical determinant of civil war.

Miguel and Raymond Fisman published a study in 2006, which compared the number of parking violations per UN diplomat in New York to Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.

The results found a strong correlation between political corruption and parking tickets, highlighting the role of cultural norms and legal enforcement in corruption.

The results were covered in The Economist, Forbes, The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, CNN, and more.

In 2008, Miguel founded the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a hub for research on global development.

Headquartered at UC Berkeley, CEGA's large, interdisciplinary network of over 150 West-Coast based faculty affiliates—and a growing number of scholars from low- and middle-income countries—identifies and tests innovations designed to reduce poverty and promote development.

CEGA's researchers use rigorous field trials, behavioral experiments, and tools from data science to measure and maximize the impacts of development programs throughout the world, generating actionable evidence for decision-makers.

In 2008 Miguel and Fisman co-authored the book, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations.

It has been translated into eleven languages including Chinese, Persian, and German and Kristof praised it as "smart and eminently readable".

In 2011, CEGA launched the East Africa Social Science Translation (EASST) Collaborative, a research network aimed at promoting scientific evaluation of social and economic development programs in East Africa.

EASST has invited and trained over 30 researchers from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia through semester-long fellowships at UC Berkeley, focused on diverse research topics related to health, education, governance, and agriculture.

Miguel, Solomon Hsiang, and Marshall Burke published a study in 2013 that found strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across all major regions of the world.

This paper garnered national and international media attention from sources including Time magazine, The Economist, and The Washington Post.

Miguel also presented the results of the study in a Ted talk in 2014.

In 2015, Miguel, Hsiang, and Burke published a study quantifying the effect of temperature on economic production across countries.

The study was cited in a 2017 article in Science on combating climate change written by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Both studies have been influential in climate policy and were cited in a special report on the impacts of global warming by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 2019, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty", citing Miguel and CEGA as additional actors linking "experimental research to policy change and advice."

Miguel is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development.