Kremer was born to a Jewish family; Son of Eugene and Sara Lillian Kremer. His father, Eugene Kremer was the son of Jewish immigrants to the US from Austria-Poland. His mother, Sara Lillian Kremer was a professor of English literature, who specialized in American Jewish and Holocaust literature. Her parents were Jewish immigrants to the US from Poland. He graduated from Harvard University. He was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1992 to 1993, visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago in Spring 1993, and professor at MIT from 1993 to 1999. Since 1999, he has been a professor at Harvard.
Career
Michael Kremer has focused his research on poverty reduction, often as it relates to education economics and health economics. Working with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, he helped establish the effectiveness of randomized controlled trials to test proposed antipoverty measures. 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.” Kremer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a research affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut-based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. Kremer is a member of Giving What We Can, an international society for the promotion of poverty relief. He is founder and president of WorldTeach, a Harvard-based organization which places college students and recent graduates as volunteer teachers on summer and year-long programs in developing countriesaround the world. He is also co-founder of Precision Agriculture for Development, a non-profit organization that leverages the global emergence of the mobile phone to provide digital agronomic advisory services to smallholder farmers at scale. Kremer started the advanced market commitment, which focuses on creating incentive mechanisms to encourage the development of vaccines for use in developing countries, and the use of randomized trials to evaluate interventions in the social sciences. He created the well-known economic theory regarding skill complementarities called Kremer's O-Ring Theory of Economic Development. In 2000, Kremer, along with Charles Morcom, published a study recommending that governments fight elephant poaching by stockpiling ivory and so that they can proactively flood the market if elephant populations decline too severely. In his widely cited paper ' Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990 ' Kremer studied economic change over the last one million years. He found that economic growth increased with population growth. Kremer led a panel on the reformation of education systems at the International Growth Centre's Growth Week 2010. He is the husband of DFID chief economist Rachel Glennerster.
