Melissa Dell

Last updated

Melissa Dell
Born1983or1984(age 40–41)
Enid, Oklahoma, U.S.
Education Harvard University (BA)
Trinity College, Oxford (MPhil)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Children2 [1]
Awards Truman Scholarship, 2004
Rhodes Scholarship, 2005
Sloan Fellowship, 2016
Carnegie Fellowship, 2017
Calvó-Armengol International Prize, 2018
Elaine Bennett Research Prize, 2018
John Bates Clark Medal, 2020
Scientific career
FieldsEconomics
Institutions Harvard University
Doctoral advisors Daron Acemoglu
Website https://scholar.harvard.edu/dell/home

Melissa Dell (born 1983or1984)[ citation needed ] is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.

Contents

Early life and education

Dell grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, where she attended Oklahoma Bible Academy. [2] Despite difficulties completing races because of her poor eyesight, she was a champion long distance runner in high school, setting a state record in the 3000-meter distance. [3] As of 2010, she was an ultramarathon (100 km) runner. [4] She was the first member of her family to go to college [5] and the first student from her high school to attend Harvard University. There, she established an organization, "College Matters," [6] and wrote a book, The College Matters Guide to Getting Into the Elite College of Your Dreams, to offer practical advice to ambitious students from similar backgrounds. [3]

She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 2005 (B.A. economics), where she competed on the track team, and attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar receiving an M.Phil. in economics in 2007. [6] In 2012, she completed her Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2012 to 2014, [7] and joined the faculty at Harvard in 2014 as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2018. [8]

Research

Dell's research interests include development economics, economic history, and political economy, with a major focus on areas of Latin America and Southeast Asia. The main focus of her work has been explaining economic development through the persistence of historical institutions. [9] [10]

One of her most cited research papers, “The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita,” published in the scholarly journal Econometrica in 2010, discusses Peru's Mining Mita and the long-term effects of colonial-era forced labor on the local populations centuries later. [11]

For example, in her paper on the long-term effects of Peru's Mining Mita, she showed that current development outcomes were influenced by whether regions were included in forced labor policies that ended in the early 1800s. This paper was also methodologically important, as it was one of the first in economics to use a spatial regression discontinuity design. [5] Dell has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa. [12] Finally, she has influential work on the economic effects of climate, especially for developing economies. [13] [14] [ non-primary source needed ] Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Selected works

Related Research Articles

Mit'a was mandatory service in the society of the Inca Empire. Its close relative, the regionally mandatory Minka is still in use in Quechua communities today and known as faena in Spanish.

In economics, an agent is an actor in a model of some aspect of the economy. Typically, every agent makes decisions by solving a well- or ill-defined optimization or choice problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fabrizio Zilibotti</span> Italian economist

Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Athey</span> American economist

Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research. She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action. She also serves as the senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She is an associate director for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the director of Golub Capital Social Impact Lab.

Rohini Pande is an economist who is currently the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She was previously the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy and Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Pande was the Co-Director of Center for International Development at Harvard University's Evidence for Policy Design research program (EPoD) and serves on the board of directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT. She also serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession (CSWEP) and as a co-editor of the American Economic Association's (AEA) journal American Economic Review: Insights. She is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, CEPR and the IFPRI. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. Her outstanding and empirical findings in fields of governance and accountability, women’s empowerment, role of credit in poverty, the economic aspects of the environment and the potential of policy design in these areas, won her the Infosys Prize 2022 in Social Sciences.

Amy Nadya Finkelstein is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.

Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economics Association in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Burgess</span> British economist

Robin Burgess is a British economist who is Professor of Economics, Co-founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, as well as Co-Founder and Director of the Economics of Energy and the Environment (EEE) program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Thomas Lemieux is a Canadian economist and professor at the University of British Columbia.

Pinelopi "Penny" Koujianou Goldberg is a Greek-American economist who served as chief economist of the World Bank from 2018 until 2020. She holds the named chair of Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Benjamin A. Olken is an American economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Olken is one of the directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research centre specializing on the use of randomized evaluations for the purpose of studying poverty alleviation. His research focuses on the political economy of developing countries, especially regarding the role of corruption and the impact of interventions addressing corruption.

Eliana La Ferrara is an Italian economist and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Before receiving tenure at Harvard in 2022, she held the Fondazione Romeo ed Enrica Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at Bocconi University, where she also acted as Scientific Director of the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Programs (LEAP). Previously, she was also the president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) as well as the president of the European Economic Association. In terms of research, her fields of interest include development economics, political economy, and public economics.

Peter Arcidiacono is an American economist and econometrician. He received his PhD from Wisconsin in 1999 and has taught at Duke University ever since. He became a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2018.

Stefana Pentcheva Stantcheva is a Bulgarian-born French economist who has served as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University since 2021. She has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique since 2018. In 2018, she was described by The Economist as one of the best young economists of the decade.

Leeat Yariv is the Uwe E. Reinhardt Professor of Economics at Princeton University, a research fellow of CEPR, and a research associate of NBER. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held positions at UCLA and Caltech prior to her move to Princeton in 2017, where she is the founder and director of the Princeton Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences (PExL). Yariv's research focuses on political economy, market design, social and economic networks, and experimental economics.

Benjamin Felt Jones is an American economist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Jones's research is mainly focused on innovation and economic development. He has worked as an economic advisor in the U.S. Treasury and the White House.

Greg Kaplan is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His research encompasses macroeconomics, labor economics and applied microeconomics, with a focus on distributional issues.

Joel Sobel is an American economist and currently professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on game theory and has been seminal in the field of strategic communication in economic games. His work with Vincent Crawford established the game-theoretic concept of cheap talk.

Emily Breza is an American development economist currently serving as the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a board member at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the International Growth Centre and National Bureau of Economic Research. Breza's primary research interests are in development economics, in particular the interplay between social networks and household finance. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.

Alessandra Voena is an Italian development and labor economist currently serving as Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the economics of the family, in addition to the study of science and innovation. Voena is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, and is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2017, she received the Carlo Alberto Medal, awarded biennially by the Collegio Carlo Alberto to the best Italian economist under the age of 40.

References

  1. ↑ Marina N. Bolotnikova (July–August 2020). "Melissa Dell". Harvard Magazine.
  2. ↑ Writer, James Neal | Staff. "Enid native wins Carnegie Fellowship". Enidnews.com. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  3. 1 2 Tyson Hubbard. "Rhodes Runners :: A profile on Harvard cross country runners Melissa Dell and Sarah Hill". www.cstv.com. Archived from the original on October 30, 2018. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  4. ↑ "Leonardo Monasterio's Blog: Melissa Dell "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Minning Mita"". Leonardo Monasterio's Blog. September 22, 2010. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  5. 1 2 Acemoglu, Daron (February 1, 2021). "Melissa Dell: Winner of the 2020 Clark Medal". Journal of Economic Perspectives. 35 (1): 231–248. doi: 10.1257/jep.35.1.231 . hdl: 1721.1/144422 . ISSN   0895-3309. S2CID   234078684.
  6. 1 2 Steven A. Mcdonald (December 16, 2004). "Cross-Country Charm". www.thecrimson.com. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  7. ↑ "Current & Former Junior Fellows: Listed by Term". Harvard University Society of Fellows. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  8. ↑ "Congratulations to Professor Melissa Dell on Promotion to Tenure!". economics.harvard.edu. Retrieved February 7, 2019.
  9. ↑ "Melissa Dell (Harvard) receives Calvó Prize for research on micro-foundations of political and social phenomena | News | Barcelona GSE". Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. June 1, 2018. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  10. ↑ "Dell, Shelby named 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellows". Harvard Gazette. April 26, 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Going the Distance people in economics". IMF. Retrieved July 10, 2023.
  12. ↑ "Our pick of the decade's eight best young economists". The Economist. December 18, 2018. ISSN   0013-0613 . Retrieved December 19, 2018.
  13. ↑ Dell, Melissa; Jones, Benjamin F; Olken, Benjamin A (July 1, 2012). "Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century". American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. 4 (3): 66–95. doi:10.1257/mac.4.3.66. ISSN   1945-7707.
  14. ↑ Dell, Melissa; Jones, Benjamin F.; Olken, Benjamin A. (September 1, 2014). "What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature". Journal of Economic Literature. 52 (3): 740–798. doi:10.1257/jel.52.3.740. hdl: 1721.1/96154 . ISSN   0022-0515. S2CID   15699542.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.