Miguel Urquiola

Miguel Urquiola is an American economist and academic. He is vice provost for Academic Initiatives, dean of Social Science, and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Urquiola's research is focused on the economics of education, development economics, and public economics. He is the author of Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research, a book exploring why the United States developed the leading research universities.

Urquiola is a fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development. and was a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources.

Education Urquiola obtained a B.A. in Economics and Political Science in 1992 from Swarthmore College. Later in 2000, he obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career Urquiola started his academic career as an assistant professor at the Bolivian Catholic University in 1998. From 2000 to 2001, he worked at the World Bank and in 2001, he joined Cornell University as an assistant professor of Economics, where he remained until 2003. He has worked at Columbia University since then, as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2009, an associate professor from 2009 to 2014, and a professor since 2014. He was a co-editor of The Journal of Human Resources. In related research, he assessed how Chile's nationwide school voucher program impacted educational outcomes and found that the availability of unrestricted choice led to increased sorting, as higher-performing public school students moved to private schools. However, the study found no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes. Furthermore, he explored how the Chilean government's use of school rankings for resource allocation influenced the effectiveness of educational programs, such as the P-900 initiative.

Urquiola's research also investigated if attending better quality school improved student outcomes and found that being enrolled in better quality schools led to improved academic performance and significant behavioral responses from teachers, students, and parents.

Urquiola wrote Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research in 2020, in which he argued that America leads the world in university research because of its free-market model of higher education instead of high student test scores. Michael Andrews in a Journal of Economic Literature review and J. E. R. Staddon writing for James G. Martin Center agreed with Urquiola's central argument. Andrews wrote that "Urquiola does a convincing job arguing that the US higher education's free market orientation has allowed it to fund the world's best system of research, and he illustrates this argument with fascinating anecdotes from history" and Staddon wrote that Urquiola "makes sense of a complex issue". However, Andrews criticized the book's narrow focus, especially the omission of "discussion of America's non-elite public universities." Staddon, on the other hand, disagreed with Urquiola's assumption that "grant-supported research is a net cost", calling it net beneficial for the institutions

Awards and honors Fellow, Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development