Michael Kremer

Origins and early life

Michael Kremer, born in New York on 12 November 1964, is the son of two children of Jewish immigrants, from Poland on his mother's side and Austrian Poland on his father's; his mother, a professor of English, specialised in American Jewish and Holocaust literature. He left high school a year early for Harvard and, after his degree, spent a year teaching at a secondary school in the Kakamega District of Kenya — the year that made him a development economist.

Back at Harvard he took his doctorate in 1992, held the Gates Professorship of Developing Societies from 2003 to 2020, and now directs the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, where he is a university professor.

Work and career

With Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo he established the randomised controlled trial as the working tool of development economics: his evaluation with Edward Miguel of school-based deworming in Kenya, showing large effects on health and schooling, led him to co-found the Deworm the World Initiative, and he has worked on the development and financing of vaccines. The three shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.