Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964) is an American
development economist who is University Professor in Economics And Public Policy at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
.
He is the founding director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.
Kremer served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
until 2020.
In 2019, he was jointly awarded the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, together with
Esther Duflo and
Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to
alleviating global poverty."
Early life and education
Michael Robert Kremer was born in 1964 to Eugene and Sara Lillian (née Kimmel) Kremer in New York City. His father, Eugene Kremer was the son of Jewish immigrants to the US from Austria-Poland. His mother, Sara Lillian Kremer was a professor of English literature, who specialized in American Jewish and Holocaust literature. Her parents were Jewish immigrants to the US from Poland. He graduated from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
(A.B. in Social Studies in 1985 and Ph.D. in economics in 1992).
Career
A postdoctoral fellow at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...
(MIT) from 1992 to 1993, Kremer was a visiting assistant professor at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
in Spring 1993, and professor at MIT from 1993 to 1999. From 1999 to 2020, he was a professor at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago as a professor in the
Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the college, and the
Harris School of Public Policy
The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, also referred to as "Harris Public Policy," is the public policy school of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is located on the University's main campus in ...
on September 1, 2020.
[
Kremer has focused his research on ]poverty
Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little income. Poverty can have diverse reduction, often as it relates to education economics and health economics. Working with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (with whom he shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics), he helped establish the effectiveness of randomized controlled trials to test proposed antipoverty measures. Describing Kremer's early use of pioneering experimental methods, Duflo said that Kremer “was there from the very beginning, and took enormous risks . . . . He is a visionary.”
Kremer is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1997) and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...
. He is a research affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is an American non-profit research and policy organization founded in 2002 by economist Dean Karlan. Since its foundation, IPA has worked with over 400 leading academics to conduct over 600 evaluations in 51 co ...
(IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...
-based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. Kremer is a member of Giving What We Can, an effective altruism organization whose members pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities. He is founder and president of WorldTeach, a Harvard-based organization which places college students and recent graduates as volunteer teachers on summer and year-long programs in developing countries around the world. He is also co-founder of Precision Development (PxD), a non-profit organization that leverages the global emergence of the mobile phone to provide digital agronomic advisory services to smallholder farmers at scale.
Kremer started the advanced market commitment, which focuses on creating incentive mechanisms to encourage the development of vaccine
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. s for use in developing countries, and the use of randomized trials to evaluate interventions in the social sciences. He created the well-known economic theory regarding skill complementarities called Kremer's O-Ring Theory of Economic Development. In 2000, Kremer, along with Charles Morcom, published a study recommending that governments fight elephant poaching by stockpiling ivory and so that they can proactively flood the market if elephant populations decline too severely.
In his widely cited paper "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990", Kremer studied economic change over the last one million years. He found that economic growth ''increased'' with population growth.
Kremer led a panel on the reformation of education systems at the International Growth Centre's Growth Week 2010. In early 2021, he was appointed by the G20 to the High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on financing the global commons for pandemic preparedness and response, co-chaired by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Lawrence Summers.
Recognition
* 2019 - Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel ( sv, Sveriges riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is an economics award administered ...
, together with co-researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
* 2018 – Boris Mints Institute
The Boris Mints Institute at Tel Aviv University is an entity promoting research and planning, founded by Dr Boris Mints.
The Boris Mints Institute was established in 2016 at the Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, and has already hel ...
Prize for Research of Strategic Policy Solutions to Global Challenges
* 2005 – Kenneth J. Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, awarded by the International Health Economics Association (IHEA)Michael Kremer
Center for Global Development
The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., and London that focuses on international development.
History
It was founded in November 2001 by former senior U.S. official Edward W. Scott, dire ...
(CGD).
Personal life
Kremer is the husband of economist
Rachel Glennerster.
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
External links
Home pageInnovations for Poverty ActionPrecision Agriculture for Development (PAD)an
at
Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
Publicationsat the
National Bureau of Economic Research
* including the Prize Lecture 8 December 2019 ''Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kremer, Michael
1964 births
20th-century American economists
21st-century American economists
American Nobel laureates
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
Center for Global Development
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Harvard University alumni
Harvard University faculty
Jewish American economists
Living people
MacArthur Fellows
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Nobel laureates in Economics
Place of birth missing (living people)
University of Chicago faculty
Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers