Faculty profiles

Members of the Economics Department

Edward Miguel

Oxfam Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics

Fields
Development Economics
Current Research
Long-run impacts of child health investments; Research transparency methods in social science research; Links between extreme climate and violent conflict.
Current Status
Teaching
PhD
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2000
Research Interests
African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; and interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor.

About Edward Miguel

Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000

He earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and Stanford University.
Ted's main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; and interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. Ted is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Development Economics, is a recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics.
Ted is a recipient of the 2012 U.C. Berkeley campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, the Best Graduate Adviser Award in the Berkeley Economics Department, and has served on over 70 completed doctoral dissertation committees. 
He co-founded the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in 2007 and serves as Faculty Director. He has served as the Co-organizer (with Dan Posner of UCLA) of the Worklng Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) since 2002. Ted is also the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). 
Miguel has written two books, Africa's Turn? (MIT Press 2009), and, with Ray Fisman, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations (Princeton University Press 2008). Economic Gangsters has been translated into ten languages, and the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof praises it as "smart and eminently readable". Miguel's other writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Forbes, and the New York Times.