Edward Miguel

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

After graduating from high school, Miguel attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a Truman Scholar Alongside organizations such as the Center for Open Science, BITSS creates and disseminates educational resources and tools to promote transparent practices, such as the use of pre-analysis plans, in the social sciences. In 2018, for example, BITSS collaborated with the Journal 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 reduce publication biases and eliminate null result penalties. In line with his work at BITSS, Miguel published a how-to guide entitled Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science alongside Garrett Christensen and Jeremy Freese. For its work promoting quality in social research, BITSS was awarded an Einstein Foundation Berlin Institutional Award in 2023.

Working Group in African Political Economy In 2002, alongside Daniel Posner of UCLA, Miguel co-founded the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE), an organization of economists, political scientists, and graduate students in the social sciences based on the West Coast of the United States conducting field research on the African continent. The randomized controlled trial involved a total of 32,000 children, and found that administering deworming treatments to children reduced rates of school absenteeism by 25%. The results of the study were published in Econometrica in 2004, and inspired the Deworm the World Initiative, an international campaign which has since 2014 delivered 1.8 billion deworming treatments to children around the world. For their work, Miguel and Kremer received the Kenneth Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association, granted to the best paper in health economics written within the previous year. Michael Kremer, co-author of "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities" Miguel and co-authors have published several long-run follow ups of the original deworming study. 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. and a reproduction 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. which found little effect on blood hemoglobin levels.

Climate and weather shocks Miguel has also pursued research alongside Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang evaluating the implications of climate change for productivity and conflict across countries. This is one of the earliest studies around this topic. In a paper in Nature, Miguel, Burke, and Hsiang show using data from across countries that productivity is nonlinear in average temperatures, peaking at 13 degrees Celsius and declining rapidly as temperatures rise. showing that historically, the risk of armed conflict in a given country in Sub-Saharan Africa in a year is strongly correlated with the presence of extreme temperatures. examining the effects of rising crop prices on property crime in 19th century Bavaria. that during droughts and floods, elderly women in rural Tanzania are substantially more likely to be murdered by close relatives, in line with beliefs that witchcraft may be responsible for adverse weather.

Cash transfers Miguel has also pursued work on the effects of unconditional cash transfers. In 2022, Miguel published the results of a randomized controlled trial examining the direct and general equilibrium effects of unconditional cash transfers on village economies in rural Kenya. It found that cash transfers have substantial indirect effects on village economies: every $1 USD of cash received by a local economy was associated with a $2.60 USD increase in total economy activity, implying a fiscal multiplier of 2.6. alongside co-authors Paul Niehaus, Michael Walker, Dennis Egger, and Johannes Haushofer.

Corruption

Miguel has also pursued research on corruption in low and middle income countries. Prior to 2002, United Nations diplomats based in New York City were essentially immune from parking violations, with vehicles ticketed but rarely towed. published by Princeton University Press. In it, they argue for automatically indexing foreign aid to climate shocks in an effort to prevent civil wars or other outbreaks of violence.

Recognition Miguel is among the most productive economists in the world, ranking in the top 250 according to Research Papers in Economics by total publication output. Several of Miguel's papers fall within the top 1% of economics publications by total accrued citations.

In 2019, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, Miguel's doctoral supervisor and co-author, for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

Other awards The Econometric Society (2025), Elected Member (2025) Chancellor's Award for Public Service for Research in the Public Interest (2014) UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) Kiel Institute for the World Economy Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs (2010) Kenneth J. Arrow Award (2005), awarded by the International Health Economics Association for the best paper in health economics

Selected publications

Books

Journal articles

Global public health

Scientific transparency

Climate and environmental stress

Civil conflict