Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer is an American economist whose research on development economics and randomized evaluations of anti-poverty programs earned him the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Deworming in Kenya: A set of Kenyan school-based trials that measured how deworming affected children’s health, attendance, and education. Kremer and Edward Miguel used these trials to estimate deworming’s effects and school spillovers.
Random assignment: A procedure that allocates participants to groups by chance, helping balance observed and unobserved characteristics. It creates comparison groups that make causal estimates possible in Kremer’s program evaluations.
Edward Miguel: An American economist whose research includes development economics, environmental economics, and the effects of infectious disease. Miguel coauthored the Kenyan school deworming study that became a landmark randomized evaluation.
Development economics: The branch of economics that studies living standards, growth, institutions, and policy in lower-income countries. Kremer’s research applies experimental methods to central questions in this field.
Teaching at the Right Level: An education approach that groups pupils by learning level and teaches foundational skills suited to their current abilities. Pratham’s evaluations showed how targeted instruction could improve learning in settings Kremer studied.
Causal inference: The study of whether and how one factor produces changes in another. Kremer’s experiments use causal reasoning to distinguish program effects from correlation.
Abhijit Banerjee: An Indian-American economist whose research helped develop experimental approaches to studying poverty and public policy. Banerjee shared the 2019 economics prize with Kremer and Esther Duflo.
Randomistas: Economists associated with using randomized controlled trials to evaluate development interventions. Kremer became one of the best-known economists in this experimental research movement.
Randomized controlled trial: An experiment that randomly assigns participants to treatment and comparison groups to estimate an intervention’s effects. Kremer helped establish randomized trials as a method for evaluating development programs.
Spillover effect: An effect of an intervention on people who did not directly receive it, often through social or economic interactions. His school deworming research measured health and attendance benefits beyond treated pupils.

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