Edward Miguel

Edward Miguel is the Distinguished Professor of Economics and Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Business & Economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000, advancing from Assistant Professor (2000-2005) and Associate Professor (2005-2009) to Professor (2009-2012) and his current distinguished positions. He also serves as Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), which he co-founded in 2007. Miguel holds S.B. degrees in Economics and Mathematics from MIT (1996) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University (2000), where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. His career includes visiting professorships at Princeton University (2002-2003) and Stanford University (2007-2008). As a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, he has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2008-2014) and on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science (2018-2021).

Miguel's primary research specializations lie in African economic development, including the economic causes and consequences of violence, the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action, interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor, and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India, authoring over 130 articles and chapters in leading academic journals, with his work cited more than 55,000 times according to Google Scholar. Notable publications include the books Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2008, with Ray Fisman), Africa’s Turn? (MIT Press, 2009), and Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research (University of California Press, 2019, with Garret Christensen and Jeremy Freese); key papers such as "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities" (Econometrica, 2004, with Michael Kremer) and "Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach" (Journal of Political Economy, 2004). His major awards and honors encompass the 2024 Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society, 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize from the International Health Economics Association, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020) and Econometric Society (2025), the 2012 UC Berkeley campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, and the 2015 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award. Miguel has co-founded the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE, 2002), Pacific Development Conference (PacDev, 2005), Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS, Faculty Director since 2013), and Berkeley Opportunity Lab, exerting substantial influence on development economics and research transparency practices.

Professional Email: emiguel@berkeley.edu