Short answers, pulled from the story.
Melissa Dell is an American economist and the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is known for her research on development economics, economic history, political economy, and computational economics, with a focus on Latin America and Southeast Asia. Her work explains how colonial-era institutions continue to shape economic outcomes centuries later.
Melissa Dell's paper "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita," published in Econometrica in 2010, examines how a colonial-era system of forced labor shaped development outcomes in affected regions long after it ended in the early 1800s. The paper was also one of the first in economics to use a spatial regression discontinuity design.
Melissa Dell grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, and attended Oklahoma Bible Academy. She was the first student from that school to attend Harvard University, where she enrolled with the help of generous financial aid.
Dell graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 2005 with a B.A. in economics. She then earned an M.Phil. in economics from Trinity College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 2007, and completed her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012.
The College Matters Guide to Getting Into the Elite College of Your Dreams is a book Melissa Dell wrote to offer practical advice to ambitious students from modest backgrounds navigating college admissions. She also founded an organization called College Matters for the same purpose.
Dell co-authored two papers on climate and economic growth with Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken, published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2012 and the Journal of Economic Literature in 2014. She also published a 2015 study in the American Economic Review on trafficking networks and the Mexican drug war, and a 2018 paper with Pablo Querubin in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on nation-building through military intervention.