After finishing his PhD, Miguel joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where has remained a professor since 2000. Since 2012, he has been the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics; since 2023, he has been the Distinguished Professor of Economics, with joint appointments in UC Berkeley's Department of Economics, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Department of Demography, and Goldman School of Public Policy. Since 2009, he has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7] He was a Visiting Professor at Stanford University during 2007-2008 and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University during 2002-2003.
Miguel is a prolific adviser, and has sat on over 140 dissertation committees while teaching at UC Berkeley.[8] His formers students include economists such as Chris Blattman, Manisha Shah, Eva Vivalt, and Suresh Naidu. In 2015, he was awarded the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award from UC Berkeley for his work mentoring and training PhD students.[8]
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.[14] The group has semi-annually meetings, in which members and invited guests present research in progress. Current and former members of the working group include Miguel, Posner, Chris Blattman, Jenny Aker, and Joshua Graff Zivin.[14]
Miguel's doctoral thesis was advised by Michael Kremer, an American development economist who later received the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to developing the "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Beginning in the late 1990s, Miguel collaborated with Kremer on a randomized controlled trial aimed at evaluating the direct and spillover effects of a school-based deworming program on education and health in rural Kenya. The experiment was inspired by a trip Kremer took to rural Kenya with his wife, Rachel Glennerster, shortly after the completion of his PhD.[15] 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%.[16] The study thus estimated that deworming could keep children in school for an additional year at a cost of $3.50 USD, substantially lower than other interventions such as subsidizing school uniforms or constructing additional schools.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19]
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.[20][21] 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.[22] They find that exposure to additional years of deworming causes a 13% increase in hourly earnings and 14% increase in consumer spending, with large increases as well in the likelihood of working outside agriculture.[22] The effects of the program on earnings were slightly smaller than those observed in a ten-year follow up, but nonetheless suggested the program was highly cost effective, generating a 37% annual rate of return.[22]
In 2013, Miguel and Kremer allowed an independent research team based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to re-evaluate the original dataset and methods used to produce their initial results. The researchers published two re-analyses of Miguel and Kremer's work: a direct replication[23] and a reproduction[24] 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.[25][26] The results of the replications thus coincided with a Cochrane review on the benefits of deworming,[27] which found little effect on blood hemoglobin levels.[26] The replications did, however, reinforce the original paper's results on school attendance.[22]
Several academics have called into question the results of the replications, suggesting their methods are unnecessarily unfair.[26]Chris Blattman, then of Columbia University, observed that "[t]here are clearly serious problems with the [Kenya] Miguel-Kremer study. But, to be quite frank, you have throw so much crazy sh*t at Miguel-Kremer to make the result go away that I believe the result even more than when I started."[26] Despite mixed evidence, charity evaluator GiveWell continued to recommend funding be allocated to deworming, noting that its low cost would make it highly cost effective if effects do materialize.[28][29] In response to the debate over the legitimacy of Miguel and Kremer's results, several media outlets and academic publications dubbed the controversy the "worm wars".[26][28][29][30]
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,[31] 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.[32] Their results suggest that in aggregate, by 2050 climate change may have cost the United States economy $5 trillion.[32]
In addition to this cross-country research, Miguel has also pursued research on the effects of weather shocks on crime and conflict in particular settings. Alongside Halvor Mehlum and Ragnar Torvik, Miguel published an article in the Journal of Urban Economics[35] examining the effects of rising crop prices on property crime in 19th century Bavaria.[36] Using rainfall as a source of random variation in rye yields, they show that grain prices are strongly correlated with rates of property crime, which Bavaria kept meticulous records of. Therefore, they suggest that poverty, hunger, and economic uncertainty may encourage theft.[36] In a similar spirit, Miguel shows in a paper in the Review of Economic Studies[37] 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.[38]
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.[39] The experiment was implemented by GiveDirectly, an international NGO, and involved the distribution of over $10 million USD in lump-sum transfers to over 10,000 poor households in Siaya County.[16][39] The project was distinguished for evaluating not just the direct effects of cash transfers on recipient households, but also their indirect effects on non-recipient households residing in the same villages.[39][40] 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,[41] implying a fiscal multiplier of 2.6.[39]
Miguel published the results of the GiveDirectly evaluation in Econometrica,[42] alongside co-authors Paul Niehaus, Michael Walker, Dennis Egger, and Johannes Haushofer.[39] The paper received the 2024 Frisch Medal, awarded every two years to the best empirical or theoretical article published in the journal within the past five years.[43] Miguel is actively involved in further research on the effects of the cash transfer program, including evaluations of its effects on child mortality.[44]
Miguel is among the most productive economists in the world, ranking in the top 300 according to Research Papers in Economics by total publication output.[50] Several of Miguel's papers fall within the top 1% of economics publications by total accrued citations.[51]
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."[1] The official scientific background for the award cited Miguel and CEGA as key additional actors linking "experimental research to policy change and advice."[1] In recognition of his work with Kremer, Miguel attended the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm.[52]
Hsiang, Solomon; Burke, Marshall; Miguel, Edward (2013). "Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict". Science. 341 (6151). doi:10.1126/science.1235367.
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