Topics:
Expertise
Migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, economic history
Bio
Michael Clemens is director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he studies the economic effects and causes of migration around the world. He has published on migration, development, economic history, and impact evaluation, in peer-reviewed academic journals including the American Economic Review, and his research has been awarded the Royal Economic Society Prize. He also serves as a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, and has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and World Development. He is the author of the book The Walls of Nations, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Previously, Clemens has been an Affiliated Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a visiting scholar at New York University, and a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program. He has lived and worked in Colombia, Brazil, and Turkey. He received his PhD from the Department of Economics at Harvard University, specializing in economic development, public finance, and economic history.
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More From Michael Clemens
October 8, 2014
Featured from CGD
El grupo de estudio Más Allá del Muro genera rigurosos trabajos de investigación para explorar cómo las decisiones de política en un lado de la frontera México-Estados Unidos repercuten en el otro lado a través de mercados ilícitos, y para informar el debate sobre las opciones de política para la regulación innovadora a través de un enfoque más bilateral.
August 25, 2014
Blog Post
Government officials across the world will sit down in conference rooms over the next year to rebuild the global development policy agenda.
July 16, 2014
Blog Post
Deadly violence in US neighbors has once again grabbed Americans’ attention. An unprecedented wave of Central American children has been arriving at the Southwest US border this year, often fleeing gang violence linked to the narcotics trade. Many of them come from Honduras, an epicenter of the Drug War with the world’s highest homicide rate.
Pages
June 4, 2010
Publication
This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers’ wages and productivity. Its findings have implications for open questions in labor, growth, international, and development economics.
October 2, 2015
Blog Post
Recent research overturns the standard narrative about refugee crises: that addressing them mainly means curtailing the conflict and poverty that “push” migrants away from home and slashing the excessive generosity that “pull” them into other countries. Instead, pragmatic and self-interested policymakers should consider that they often waste resources when trying to reduce push factors, and they can spark an inhumane and inefficient race to the bottom by acting individually to reduce pull factors. Through broad international cooperation to get people out of camps and into the labor force, though, they can transform refugees from a burden into an investment.
February 20, 2018
Blog Post
UN Member States are gathering today in New York at the United Nations Headquarters for the first round of negotiations on the Global Compact on Migration zero draft. It is a once-a-generation chance to shape migration cooperatively, for mutual benefit. Global migration governance is, in its current form, unprepared and insufficient to manage future flows.
May 7, 2013
Blog Post
Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation have written a report claiming that regularizing unauthorized immigrants in the United States will cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. Neither Rector nor Richwine are trained economists and the methods that they use to arrive at this number are not economic analysis.
December 19, 2002
Publication
Global private capital flows have barely touched the poorest nations; the rich invest mostly with the rich. It is possible that failures in the global capital market prevent capital from exploiting high returns in poor countries; it is also possible that fundamental returns to investment are lower in poor countries. In this paper, a novel empirical framework uses standard data to conclude that 85% of wealth bias, whether caused by market failure or not, is domestic in origin. That is, poor country lenders are deterred from investing in poor countries to nearly the same degree that rich-country lenders are.
June 1, 2003
Blog Post
Every developed country was once a developing country; every rich country was once poor.
May 4, 2012
Blog Post
If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year.
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