Edward Miguel


Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action at U.C. Berkeley.
His research focuses on African economic development and includes work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; and interactions between health, education, environment, 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. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. More recently, Miguel has focused his efforts on increasing transparency in the social sciences.

Education

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 thesis titled Political economy of education and health in Kenya under the supervision of Michael Kremer, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

Career

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 an Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Development Economics. His research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Science Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, among others.
In 2008, Miguel founded the Center for Effective Global Action, a hub for research on global development. Faculty affiliates design and test solutions for the problems of poverty, generating actionable evidence for decision-makers. CEGA's West Coast-based network of over 70 academic affiliates from University of British Columbia, across the University of California, Stanford University and the University of Washington use rigorous field trials, behavioral experiments, and tools from data science to measure and maximize the impacts of economics development programs throughout the world.
In 2004, Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer published the results of their 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 with World and the government initiatives it supports have reached over 200 million children in Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Vietnam. Subsequent work has shown long-term positive impacts of deworming on labor market outcomes, Their research was covered by several news outlets including The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune. 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 civil war in sub-Saharan Africa. The study shows that a 5 percent negative growth shock increases the likelihood of a 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 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."
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 2012 Miguel helped launch The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, which aims to promote transparency in empirical social science research. BITSS engages researchers through participatory forums on critical issues surrounding data transparency and encourages the use of study registries, pre-analysis plans, data sharing, and replication. In 2014, Miguel and co-authors published a piece in Science that makes the case for better research transparency practices in the social sciences. In 2015, Miguel and co-authors published another price in Science on the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines.
In 2016, Miguel helped co-found the Berkeley Opportunity Lab, which generates rigorous evidence on critical issues surrounding poverty and inequality.

Awards