Michael Kremer

A Kansas childhood

Michael Robert Kremer was born on November 12, 1964, in New York City, to Eugene Kremer and Sara Lillian (née Kimmel) Kremer. Both of his parents were the children of Jewish immigrants: his father’s family came from Austria-Poland and his mother’s from Poland. The family moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where both parents taught at Kansas State University, his father in architecture and his mother in English, specializing in American Jewish and Holocaust literature.

Kremer was a precocious student. From fifth grade he took classes at Kansas State, and by his junior year of high school he had enough credits to count as a university sophomore. He left Manhattan High School a year early for Harvard, where he studied social studies, writing his senior thesis on an employment guarantee programme in India and a food subsidy scheme in Sri Lanka, and graduated magna cum laude in 1985.

A year in Kenya

After college Kremer spent a year as a teacher and administrator at Eshisiru Secondary School in Kakamega District in western Kenya. The experience shaped the rest of his life. On his return he co-founded WorldTeach, a nonprofit that places volunteer teachers in developing countries, and he later served as president of its board.

He went back to Harvard for a Ph.D. in economics, completed in 1992, with a prize-winning dissertation on long-run economic growth. One early idea, the O-ring theory of development, was named after the small seal whose failure destroyed the space shuttle Challenger. It argued that in complex production a single weak link can ruin the whole, so skilled workers are most valuable when surrounded by other skilled workers, which helps explain huge income gaps between countries and the brain drain from poor ones. Kremer said the idea came from a WorldTeach training session in Kenya that was nearly derailed because he forgot to buy toilet paper.

Other early work ranged widely. In a much-cited study of the very long run, Kremer found that, among societies cut off from one another with similar technology, those with larger populations saw faster technological progress, consistent with the idea that more people produce more ideas. With Charles Morcom he argued that governments could protect endangered elephants by holding stockpiles of ivory to sell when populations fell, so as to undercut poachers, a proposal that other economists criticized for creating perverse incentives.

Bringing experiments to poverty

Kremer taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1992, then from 1999 at Harvard, where he was Gates Professor of Developing Societies from 2003 to 2020. In the mid-1990s he and his colleagues moved part of their research to rural western Kenya to ask a simple question: which school programmes actually improve learning at the lowest cost? Comparing schools that happen to have more textbooks tells you little, because such schools differ in many other ways. So, working with a local nonprofit, Kremer’s team randomly assigned schools to receive different kinds of help at different times, borrowing the logic of the clinical trial.

The results surprised many. Extra textbooks and free school meals did little to raise test scores, and textbooks helped only the strongest pupils. Later studies by Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and others showed that the bigger problems were teaching that did not match pupils’ needs and weak accountability, including high teacher absence. With colleagues, Kremer used unannounced visits to show that about a quarter of teachers in Indian public schools were absent on a typical day, and that health worker absence averaged 35 percent across several countries. Field experiments of this kind became, in the Nobel committee’s words, development economists’ standard method for testing measures to alleviate poverty.

Deworming children

In the late 1990s Kremer suggested that a Kenyan programme giving schoolchildren cheap pills against intestinal worms be rolled out to schools in random order, so its effects could be measured. The study with his student Edward Miguel, published in 2004, found that deworming cut school absenteeism by a quarter and benefited even untreated children nearby by reducing infection. A follow-up study published in 2021 found that people who received two to three extra years of treatment as children had consumer spending about 14 percent higher as adults, and were more likely to live in cities and work outside agriculture. Kremer also showed how sensitive poor families are to price: 75 percent of parents gave their children deworming pills when they were free, but only 18 percent when they cost less than a dollar.

The research helped persuade governments and the World Health Organization to support free mass deworming in schools where infection is common. Kremer co-founded the Deworm the World Initiative, now run by the nonprofit Evidence Action, which supports government-run school deworming programmes and has delivered more than 1.8 billion treatments since 2014. The size of the long-term benefits has been debated: the charity evaluator GiveWell describes strong evidence that the pills reduce worm infections and weaker evidence on life outcomes, but still considers the programme highly cost-effective because the potential benefits are large and the cost is well under a dollar per child.

Paying for vaccines before they exist

After contracting malaria in Kenya, Kremer became interested in why drug companies invest so little in vaccines for diseases of poor countries. The problem, he argued, is that companies fear that once they have spent heavily on development, they will be pressed to sell at low prices. In a 2004 book with his wife, the economist Rachel Glennerster, he proposed advance market commitments: legally binding promises by donors to buy a vaccine at a set price if one is developed that meets agreed standards.

The idea was put into practice for pneumococcal disease, a major cause of deadly pneumonia in young children. In 2007 Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, Norway and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged 1.5 billion dollars, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, launched the commitment with the World Bank and UNICEF. Manufacturers agreed to supply the vaccines to poor countries for at least ten years at a small fraction of rich-country prices. Gavi reported that by 2018 the vaccines were routinely delivered in 58 of the world’s poorest countries and had protected about 109 million children, and that they were offered at less than ten percent of the U.S. public market price. During the COVID-19 pandemic Kremer co-founded the Accelerating Health Technologies group, which advised governments, including on the U.S. Operation Warp Speed programme, on how to secure vaccine supplies quickly.

Investing in what works

Kremer has turned evidence into institutions. In 2002 he co-founded the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a network for development researchers. In 2010 he co-founded Development Innovation Ventures at USAID, which funds new ideas against poverty in stages, scaling up only those that prove themselves in rigorous tests; by its own estimates the programme generated about 17 dollars in social benefit for every dollar invested. After an experiment showed that text-message farming advice raised Kenyan smallholders’ yields, he co-founded Precision Development, a nonprofit that provides digital agricultural advice to millions of farmers at very low cost.

The Nobel committee noted that programmes scaled up after evaluation by researchers in the network Banerjee and Duflo helped found had reached more than 400 million people, and that just as important was the money saved by closing programmes shown not to work. Since 2009 Kremer has been a member of Giving What We Can, whose members pledge at least ten percent of their income to effective charities.

Kremer also took part in a study of a lottery-based school voucher programme in Colombia, with Joshua Angrist and others, which found that pupils who won vouchers for private secondary schools were more likely to finish school and scored higher on tests, benefits that likely exceeded the vouchers’ cost. Precision Development, the farm-advice nonprofit he co-founded, had 5.7 million users in 2020, at an average cost of about 1.61 dollars per user.

Family and Jewish roots

Kremer’s parents were both children of Jewish immigrants from Poland, and his mother devoted her scholarly career to American Jewish literature and the literature of the Holocaust. The Jewish Virtual Library includes him among Jewish Nobel laureates. He has not written publicly about religious practice.

He is married to Rachel Glennerster, a British development economist who has served as chief economist of the UK Department for International Development and as president of the Center for Global Development, and who has been his collaborator on vaccine financing. In 2020 he moved to the University of Chicago as a University Professor and director of the Development Innovation Lab, and in September 2026 the World Bank named him its chief economist from October 1, 2026, the first person to take the post already holding a Nobel Prize.

Legacy

In 2019 Kremer shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Banerjee and Duflo for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Duflo has called him a visionary who was there from the very beginning and took enormous risks.

His influence is practical. He helped change development work from a field driven by good intentions and broad theories into one that tests specific programmes and follows the evidence, and he has repeatedly turned what he learned into organizations that reach children and farmers at scale. Hundreds of millions of children have received deworming pills or pneumococcal vaccines through efforts he helped start, and a generation of researchers and aid agencies now ask the question he brought to rural Kenya: does this actually work, and at what cost?

Sources & further reading

A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.