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.
Click here for full CV
More From Michael Clemens
March 17, 2015
Blog Post
The United States has an interest in a prosperous, secure Mexico—the second largest customer for American exporters. Is that interest adequately served by US policy?
December 17, 2014
Blog Post
I’m delighted to be helping organize again, for 2015, the world’s premier research conference on the economics of migration and development. Full-paper submissions are due January 20, at migdevconference@cgdev.org.
Pages
September 7, 2011
Blog Post
If you found a trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk, would you pick it up?
April 1, 2003
Publication
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 the nations of the world committed to join forces to meet a set of measurable targets for reducing world poverty, disease, illiteracy and other indicators of human misery—all by the year 2015. These targets, later named the Millennium Development Goals, include seven measures of human development in poor countries. At the same summit, world leaders took on several qualitative targets applicable to rich countries, later collected in an eighth Goal. The key elements of the eighth Goal, pledge financial support and policy changes in trade, debt relief, and other areas to assist poor countries'domestic efforts to meet the first seven Goals. Combined, the eight Goals constitute a global compact between poor and rich to work today toward their mutual interests to secure a prosperous future.
October 11, 2010
Blog Post
A version of this blog also appeared on the Huffington Post.
Back in 2004 a major new development project started in Bar-Sauri, Kenya. This Millennium Village Project (MVP) seeks to break individual village clusters free from poverty with an intense, combined aid package for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. The United Nations and Columbia University began the pilot phase in Bar-Sauri and have extended it to numerous village clusters in nine other countries. They hope to scale up the approach across much of Africa.
But wait: Before we consider blanketing a continent with any aid intervention, we have to know whether or not it works. For example, we have to know if different things have happened in Bar-Sauri than have happened in nearby Uranga, which was not touched by the project. And we have to know if those differences will last. This matters because aid money is scarce, and the tens of millions slated for the MVP are tens of millions that won’t be spent on other efforts.
Here I discuss a new research paper that I wrote with Gabriel Demombynes of the World Bank.
August 8, 2017
Blog Post
CGD experts Michael Clemens and Gaurav Khanna look at high- and low-skilled workers from three countries across several decades. Different studies, different perspectives—but all pointing at the same thing: immigrants have an overwhelmingly net positive effect on the US economy.
May 20, 2009
Publication
Economists often use instrumental variables to demonstrate a causal relationship between some trait of a country and economic growth. In this new analysis, Samuel Bazzi and Michael Clemens show that a variety of instrumental variables used in top economics journals have severe but hidden limitations. They present three guidelines to improve future empirical studies of growth determinants.
January 6, 2014
Blog Post
As the fourth anniversary of the massive, January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti approached, I invited CGD senior fellows Vijaya Ramachandran and Michael Clemens, experts respectively on disaster relief and labor mobility, to join me on the Wonkcast to discuss the role of outsiders in trying to assist Haiti’s recovery.
February 4, 2013
Blog Post
Last week saw the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda meeting in Liberia. Apparently various panel members used
February 28, 2012
Blog Post
Commentary Menu