Michael Kremer

Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964) is an American development economist, who is currently the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Kremer is also a Research Affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut-based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. In addition to his work at Innovations for Poverty Action, Kremer is a member of Giving What We Can, an international society for the promotion of poverty relief. Kremer is founder and president of WorldTeach, a Harvard-based organization which places college students and recent graduates as volunteer teachers on summer and year-long programs in developing countries around the world.

Kremer's work focuses on the use of incentives, particularly the design of incentive mechanisms to encourage the development of vaccines for use in developing countries, and the use of randomized trials to evaluate interventions in the social sciences. He created the well-known economic theory regarding skill complementarities called Kremer's O-Ring Theory of Economic Development.

Kremer proposed one of the most convincing explanations for the phenomenon of the World System population hyperbolic growth observed prior to the early 1970s, as well as the economic mechanisms of the demographic transition. Kremer has also presented his research in the field of human capital at the International Growth Centre's Growth Week 2010.