Melissa Dell

Melissa Dell
Born1983 or 1984 (age 39–40)
EducationHarvard University (BA)
Trinity College, Oxford (MPhil)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Children2
AwardsTruman 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
InstitutionsHarvard University
Doctoral advisorsDaron Acemoglu
Websitehttps://scholar.harvard.edu/dell/home

Melissa Dell (born 1983 or 1984)[citation needed] is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.

Early life & education

Dell grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, where she attended Oklahoma Bible Academy. 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. As of 2010, she was an ultramarathon (100 km) runner. She was the first member of her family to go to college and the first student from her high school to attend Harvard University. There, she established an organization, "College Matters," 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.

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 a M.Phil. in economics in 2007. 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, and joined the faculty at Harvard in 2014 as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2018.

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.

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.

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. Dell has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa. Finally, she has influential work on the economic effects of climate, especially for developing economies.[non-primary source needed] Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Selected works


This page was last updated at 2024-02-07 17:15 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari