Edward Miguel
Biographic Data
| ID | 930557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward Miguel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward |
| FAMILY NAME | Miguel |
| SIGNATURE | MIGUEL E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6927-709X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1655 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Validation of cognitive and psychosocial tools in Kenya
The successful adaptation of these assessment tools in Kenya demonstrates the feasibility of implementing rigorous cognitive and psychosocial measurements in low-resource settings. These findings provide a methodological framework for future aging studies in similar contexts across Sub-Saharan Africa
Parent psychological well-being, home learning environment, and child development among Kenyan families
Destructive Behaviour, Judgement and Economic Decision-making under Thermal Stress
Accumulating evidence indicates that environmental temperature substantially affects economic outcomes and violence, but the reasons for this linkage are only partially understood. We study whether temperature directly influences behaviour by evaluating the effect of thermal stress on multiple dimensions of economic decision-making, judgement and destructive behaviour with 2,000 participants in Kenya and the United States who were randomly assign…
Promoting Reproducibility and Replicability in Political Science
This article reviews and summarizes current reproduction and replication practices in political science. We first provide definitions for reproducibility and replicability. We then review data availability policies for 28 leading political science journals and present the results from a survey of editors about their willingness to publish comments and replications. We discuss new initiatives that seek to promote and generate high-quality reproduc…
Unlocking the benefits of credit through saving
Reproduction and replication at scale
Skill Versus Voice in Local Development
Where the state is weak, traditional authorities control the local provision of public goods. These leaders come from an older, less educated generation and often rule in an authoritarian and exclusionary fashion. This means the skills of community members may not be leveraged in policymaking. We experimentally evaluate two solutions to this problem in Sierra Leone: one encourages delegation to higher-skill individuals, and a second fosters broad…
Human capital affects religious identity
Long-Run Effects of Aid
We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralised approach to economic development called community-driven development—a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid—by revisiting a randomised community-driven development program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains in local public goods and market activity, and modest positive effects on institutions. There is suggestive evidence that community-driven deve…
Deepening or Diminishing Ethnic Divides? The Impact of Urban Migration in Kenya
The impact of urban migration on ethnic politics is the subject of long‐standing debate. “First‐generation” modernization theories predict that urban migration should reduce ethnic identification and increase trust between groups. “Second‐generation” modernization perspectives argue the opposite: Urban migration may amplify ethnic identification and reduce trust. We test these competing expectations with a three‐wave panel survey following more t…
The illusion of stable fertility preferences
Fertility preferences have long played a key role in models of fertility differentials and change. We examine the stability of preferences over time using rich panel data on Kenyan women's fertility desires, expectations, actual fertility, and recall of desires in three waves over a nine-year period, when respondents were in their 20s. We find that although desired fertility is quite unstable, most women perceive their desires to be stable. Under…
Falling living standards during the Covid-19 crisis
Income, employment, and food security fell sharply across low- and middle-income countries during the COVID crisis.
Self-Control and Demand for Preventive Health
Self-control problems constitute a potential explanation for the underinvestment in preventive health in low-income countries. Behavioral economics offers a tool to solve such problems: commitment devices. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of theoretically motivated commitment contracts in increasing preventive doctor visits by hypertensive patients in rural India. Despite achieving high take-up of suc…
Elections and selfishness
Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters' self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to …
Evidence on Research Transparency in Economics
A decade ago, the term "research transparency" was not on economists' radar screen, but in a few short years a scholarly movement has emerged to bring new open science practices, tools and norms into the mainstream of our discipline. The goal of this article is to lay out the evidence on the adoption of these approaches - in three specific areas: open data, pre-registration and pre-analysis plans, and journal policies - and, more tentatively, beg…
Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development
In recent years, electrification has reemerged as a key priority in low-income countries, with a particular focus on electrifying households. Yet the microeconomic literature examining the impacts of electrifying households on economic development has produced a set of conflicting results. Does household electrification lead to measurable gains in living standards or not? Focusing on grid electrification, we discuss how the divergent conclusions …
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research
Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification
We present results from an experiment that randomized the expansion of electric grid infrastructure in rural Kenya. Electricity distribution is a canonical example of a natural monopoly. Experimental variation in the number of connections, combined with administrative cost data, reveals considerable scale economies, as hypothesized. Randomized price offers indicate that demand for connections falls sharply with price. Among newly connected househ…
Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research
There is growing interest in enhancing research transparency and reproducibility in economics and other scientific fields. We survey existing work on these topics within economics and discuss the evidence suggesting that publication bias, inability to replicate, and specification searching remain widespread in the discipline. We next discuss recent progress in this area, including through improved research design, study registration and pre-analy…
Worms at Work
This study estimates long-run impacts of a child health investment, exploiting community-wide experimental variation in school-based deworming. The program increased labor supply among men and education among women, with accompanying shifts in labor market specialization. Ten years after deworming treatment, men who were eligible as boys stay enrolled for more years of primary school, work 17% more hours each week, spend more time in nonagricultu…
Education as Liberation
This paper studies the political and social impacts of increased education by utilizing a randomized girls' merit scholarship programme in Kenya that raised test scores and secondary schooling. Consistent with the view that education empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority, we find that the programme reduced the acceptance of domestic violence and political authority. Young women in programme schools also increased their objective polit…
Can War Foster Cooperation
In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engageme…
The Value of Democracy
Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: …
Promoting an open research culture
Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility
Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict
Estimating the impact of economic conditions on the likelihood of civil conflict is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. We use rainfall variation as an instrumental variable for economic growth in 41 African countries during 1981–99. Growth is strongly negatively related to civil conflict: a negative growth shock of five percentage points increases the likelihood of conflict by one‐half the following year. We attempt to ru…
Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa
This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical method…
Can War Foster Cooperation
In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engageme…
Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement
We study cultural norms and legal enforcement in controlling corruption by analyzing the parking behavior of United Nations officials in Manhattan. Until 2002, diplomatic immunity protected UN diplomats from parking enforcement actions, so diplomats’ actions were constrained by cultural norms alone. We find a strong effect of corruption norms: diplomats from high‐corruption countries (on the basis of existing survey‐based indices) accumulated sig…
The Electoral Cost of War
Many contend that President Bush's reelection and increased vote share in 2004 prove that the Iraq War was either electorally irrelevant or aided him. We present contrary evidence. Focusing on the change in Bush's 2004 showing compared to 2000, we discover that Iraq casualties from a state significantly depressed the President's vote share there. We infer that were it not for the approximately 10,000 U.S. dead and wounded by Election Day, Bush wo…
Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania
This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation …
Tribe or Nation
This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a "natural experiment." Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation …
The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam
Orphans and schooling in Africa
AIDS deaths could have a major impact on economic development by affecting the human capital accumulation of the next generation. We estimate the impact of parent death on primary school participation using an unusual five-year panel data set of over 20,000 Kenyan children. There is a substantial decrease in school participation following a parent death and a smaller drop before the death (presumably due to pre-death morbidity). Estimated impacts…
Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities
Journal Article Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities Get access Rachel Glennerster, Rachel Glennerster MIT, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Edward Miguel, Edward Miguel University of California, Berkeley and NBER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Alexander D. Rothenberg Alexander D. Rothenberg RAND Corporation Sea…
Experimental Evidence on the Economics of Rural Electrification
We present results from an experiment that randomized the expansion of electric grid infrastructure in rural Kenya. Electricity distribution is a canonical example of a natural monopoly. Experimental variation in the number of connections, combined with administrative cost data, reveals considerable scale economies, as hypothesized. Randomized price offers indicate that demand for connections falls sharply with price. Among newly connected househ…
The illusion of stable fertility preferences
Fertility preferences have long played a key role in models of fertility differentials and change. We examine the stability of preferences over time using rich panel data on Kenyan women's fertility desires, expectations, actual fertility, and recall of desires in three waves over a nine-year period, when respondents were in their 20s. We find that although desired fertility is quite unstable, most women perceive their desires to be stable. Under…
Education as Liberation
This paper studies the political and social impacts of increased education by utilizing a randomized girls' merit scholarship programme in Kenya that raised test scores and secondary schooling. Consistent with the view that education empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority, we find that the programme reduced the acceptance of domestic violence and political authority. Young women in programme schools also increased their objective polit…
Deepening or Diminishing Ethnic Divides? The Impact of Urban Migration in Kenya
The impact of urban migration on ethnic politics is the subject of long‐standing debate. “First‐generation” modernization theories predict that urban migration should reduce ethnic identification and increase trust between groups. “Second‐generation” modernization perspectives argue the opposite: Urban migration may amplify ethnic identification and reduce trust. We test these competing expectations with a three‐wave panel survey following more t…
Promoting Reproducibility and Replicability in Political Science
This article reviews and summarizes current reproduction and replication practices in political science. We first provide definitions for reproducibility and replicability. We then review data availability policies for 28 leading political science journals and present the results from a survey of editors about their willingness to publish comments and replications. We discuss new initiatives that seek to promote and generate high-quality reproduc…
Does Industrialization Build or Destroy Social Networks
This article estimates the relationship between changes in industrialization and changes in social networks measures in Indonesia during 1985–97 using repeated cross sections of nationally representative surveys. We analyze a rich set of social interaction measures, including various measures of voluntary associational activity, levels of trust, and informal cooperation. Districts that experienced rapid industrialization showed significant increa…
Evidence on Research Transparency in Economics
A decade ago, the term "research transparency" was not on economists' radar screen, but in a few short years a scholarly movement has emerged to bring new open science practices, tools and norms into the mainstream of our discipline. The goal of this article is to lay out the evidence on the adoption of these approaches - in three specific areas: open data, pre-registration and pre-analysis plans, and journal policies - and, more tentatively, beg…
Does Household Electrification Supercharge Economic Development
In recent years, electrification has reemerged as a key priority in low-income countries, with a particular focus on electrifying households. Yet the microeconomic literature examining the impacts of electrifying households on economic development has produced a set of conflicting results. Does household electrification lead to measurable gains in living standards or not? Focusing on grid electrification, we discuss how the divergent conclusions …
Long-Run Effects of Aid
We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralised approach to economic development called community-driven development—a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid—by revisiting a randomised community-driven development program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains in local public goods and market activity, and modest positive effects on institutions. There is suggestive evidence that community-driven deve…
Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany
Reproduction and replication at scale
Economic Shocks and Democratization in Africa
The literature on the determinants of democratization has long been dominated by a view that claimed a central role for economic development (‘modernization’). Acemogluet al. (2008, 2009) have recently challenged the robustness of empirical support for the modernization hypothesis. As an alternative, they claim that democratization is likely to occur in moments of economic crisis. Brückner and Ciccone (2011) appear to offer strong support for thi…
Worms
Intestinal helminths—including hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, and schistosomiasis—infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. Studies in which medical treatment is randomized at the individual level potentially doubly underestimate the benefits of treatment, missing externality benefits to the comparison group from reduced disease transmission, and therefore also underestimating benefits for the treatment group. We evaluate a Kenyan p…
Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict
Estimating the impact of economic conditions on the likelihood of civil conflict is difficult because of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. We use rainfall variation as an instrumental variable for economic growth in 41 African countries during 1981–99. Growth is strongly negatively related to civil conflict: a negative growth shock of five percentage points increases the likelihood of conflict by one‐half the following year. We attempt to ru…
Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania
This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a “natural experiment.” Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation …
Tribe or Nation
This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a "natural experiment." Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation …
Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in Kenya
Poverty and Witch Killing
Existing empirical studies are typically unable to sort out the direction of causality between poverty and violent crime in less developed countries. This study uses local rainfall variation – which is plausibly exogenous and closely related to income – to estimate the impact of negative income shocks on murder in 67 Tanzanian villages across eleven years. Extreme rainfall leads to a large statistically significant increase in the murder of “witc…
Does Social Capital Promote Industrialization? Evidence from a Rapid Industrializer
A new stylized fact in development economics is the importance of social capital in promoting economic growth. This paper examines the effect of social capital on industrialization in Indonesia. We analyze a rich set of social capital and social interaction measures, including voluntary associational activity and levels of trust and informal cooperation. The main finding is that initial social capital does not predict subsequent industrial develo…
Entrepreneurship
War and Institutions
Scholars of economic development have argued that war can have adverse impacts on later economic performance: war destroys physical capital and infrastructure and disrupts human capital accumulation, and it may also damage institutions by creating political instability, destroying the social fabric and endangering civil liberties (World Bank 2003). Understanding war’s impact on development is particularly important for Sub-Saharan Africa, where t…
Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany
Does Industrialization Build or Destroy Social Networks
This article estimates the relationship between changes in industrialization and changes in social networks measures in Indonesia during 1985–97 using repeated cross sections of nationally representative surveys. We analyze a rich set of social interaction measures, including various measures of voluntary associational activity, levels of trust, and informal cooperation. Districts that experienced rapid industrialization showed significant increa…
The Illusion of Sustainability
We use a randomized evaluation of a Kenyan deworming program to estimate peer effects in technology adoption and to shed light on foreign aid donors' movement towards sustainable community provision of public goods. Deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission. People were less likely to take deworming if their direct first-order or indirect second-order social contacts were exposed to dew…
Orphans and schooling in Africa
AIDS deaths could have a major impact on economic development by affecting the human capital accumulation of the next generation. We estimate the impact of parent death on primary school participation using an unusual five-year panel data set of over 20,000 Kenyan children. There is a substantial decrease in school participation following a parent death and a smaller drop before the death (presumably due to pre-death morbidity). Estimated impacts…
Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement
We study cultural norms and legal enforcement in controlling corruption by analyzing the parking behavior of United Nations officials in Manhattan. Until 2002, diplomatic immunity protected UN diplomats from parking enforcement actions, so diplomats’ actions were constrained by cultural norms alone. We find a strong effect of corruption norms: diplomats from high‐corruption countries (on the basis of existing survey‐based indices) accumulated sig…
The Electoral Cost of War
Many contend that President Bush's reelection and increased vote share in 2004 prove that the Iraq War was either electorally irrelevant or aided him. We present contrary evidence. Focusing on the change in Bush's 2004 showing compared to 2000, we discover that Iraq casualties from a state significantly depressed the President's vote share there. We infer that were it not for the approximately 10,000 U.S. dead and wounded by Election Day, Bush wo…
War and local collective action in Sierra Leone
Incentives to Learn
Civil War
Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. Yet while civil war is central to many nations' development, it has stood at the periphery of economics research and teaching. The past decade has witnessed a long overdue explosion of research into war's causes and consequences. We summarize progress, identify weaknesses, and chart a path forward. Why war? Existing theory is provocative but incomplete, omitting advances in beha…
The long-run impact of bombing Vietnam
Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa
This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical method…
Government Transfers and Political Support
This paper estimates the impact of a large anti-poverty cash transfer program, the Uruguayan PANES, on political support for the government that implemented it. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pretreatment eligibility score, we find that beneficiary households are 11 to 13 percentage points more likely to favor the current government relative to the previous government. Political support effects persist after the program …
Spring Cleaning
Using a randomized evaluation in Kenya, we measure health impacts of spring protection, an investment that improves source water quality. We also estimate households' valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water, which limits incentives for private investment. Spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66%, but household water quality …
Incentivising safe sex
OBJECTIVE: The authors evaluated the use of conditional cash transfers as an HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention strategy to incentivise safe sex. DESIGN: An unblinded, individually randomised and controlled trial. SETTING: 10 villages within the Kilombero/Ulanga districts of the Ifakara Health and Demographic Surveillance System in rural south-west Tanzania. PARTICIPANTS: The authors enrolled 2399 participants, aged 18-30 years, in…
Reshaping Institutions
Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional performance, and the temptation to “cherry pick” estimates from among the large number of indicators required to capture this multifaceted subject. We evaluate one attempt to make local institutions more d…
Voting and Democratic Citizenship in Africa
Economics (39 works) · Political science (33 works) · Economic growth (19 works) · Development economics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (13 works)