Dell grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, where she attended Oklahoma Bible Academy.[2] Despite difficulties completing races because of her poor eyesight, she was a champion long distance runner in high school, setting a state record in the 3000-meter distance.[3] As of 2010, she was an ultramarathon (100 km) runner.[4] She was the first member of her family to go to college[5] and the first student from her high school to attend Harvard University. There, she established an organization, "College Matters,"[6] and wrote a book, The College Matters Guide to Getting Into the Elite College of Your Dreams, to offer practical advice to ambitious students from similar backgrounds.[3]
One of her most cited research papers, “The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita,” published in the scholarly journal Econometrica in 2010, discusses Peru's Mining Mita and the long-term effects of colonial-era forced labor on the local populations centuries later. [11]
For example, in her paper on the long-term effects of Peru's Mining Mita, she showed that current development outcomes were influenced by whether regions were included in forced labor policies that ended in the early 1800s. This paper was also methodologically important, as it was one of the first in economics to use a spatial regression discontinuity design.[5] Dell has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa.[12] Finally, she has influential work on the economic effects of climate, especially for developing economies.[13][14][non-primary source needed] Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. "What do we learn from the weather? The new climate-economy literature." Journal of Economic Literature 52, no. 3 (2014): 740–98.
Dell, Melissa. "Trafficking networks and the Mexican drug war." American Economic Review 105, no. 6 (2015): 1738–79.
Dell, Melissa, and Pablo Querubin. "Nation building through foreign intervention: Evidence from discontinuities in military strategies." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 701–764.
References
^Marina N. Bolotnikova (July–August 2020). "Melissa Dell". Harvard Magazine.