Melissa Dell

• 1. Introduction

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  Melissa Dell set a state record in the 3000-meter race in high school, despite eyesight so poor it made completing races a challenge. She grew up in Enid, Oklahoma, where her parents worked as civilian contractors at Vance Air Force Base. Today she holds the Andrew E. Furer Professorship of Economics at Harvard University. Her scholarship keeps returning to a fundamental question: when a system of forced labor collapses after centuries, does the harm it caused disappear with it? The regions she studies, in Peru and across Southeast Asia, have been her laboratory for testing that question. She was the first student from her high school to attend Harvard.

• 2. Scholar from Enid

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  Oklahoma Bible Academy in Enid was the school Dell attended before Harvard, and generous financial aid was what made the tuition possible. That path later shaped a practical project she designed for others in similar situations. She founded an organization called College Matters. A companion guide followed: The College Matters Guide to Getting Into the Elite College of Your Dreams. Both were designed to help students from comparable backgrounds navigate an admissions process that can otherwise feel impenetrable.

  She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics from Harvard in 2005, also competing on the university's track team. She then left for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, attending Trinity College and earning an M.Phil. in economics in 2007. Her doctoral work took her to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her Ph.D. in economics in 2012. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she spent two years as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, from 2012 to 2014. She joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 2014 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2018.

  As of 2010, she was also competing in ultramarathons of 100 kilometers.

• 3. The Mining Mita

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  In 2010, the journal Econometrica published a paper by Dell that has become one of her most cited works. Titled "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita," it examined a colonial-era system of forced labor. The mita ended in the early 1800s, but Dell's paper asked whether its effects had.

  Dell's analysis asked a direct question: had communities once subject to the mita developed differently from neighboring ones that had been exempt? The answer was yes. Current development outcomes in regions that once fell within the mita's boundaries differed from those that did not, centuries after the policy itself had ended.

  Dell's paper was also a methodological landmark. It was one of the first works in economics to use what researchers call a spatial regression discontinuity design. This technique compares outcomes on either side of a geographic boundary. It allows the researcher to isolate a historical policy's effect rather than attributing differences to unrelated causes. By using the mita's geographic limits as a natural dividing line, Dell could argue that the policy itself was driving the development gap. Other possible causes, held roughly constant across that boundary, could be set aside.

  Dell's research interests span development economics, economic history, political economy, and computational economics, with a geographic focus on Latin America and Southeast Asia. The main focus of her work has been explaining economic development through the persistence of historical institutions. The mita paper put that approach into precise empirical form.

  Dell's interest in conflict and its economic effects would lead her next to Mexico, where she examined the geography of drug trafficking networks.

• 4. Climate, Conflict, and Policy

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  Dell investigated how conflict reshapes labor markets and political outcomes. Her 2015 paper in the American Economic Review traced trafficking networks in the context of the Mexican drug war. It examined how organized violence intersects with labor and political conditions at the local level. Three years later, Dell and Pablo Querubin published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on what follows from foreign military intervention. It studied discontinuities in military strategies to measure the effect of that intervention on nation-building.

  Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken joined Dell as co-authors on two papers about climate and economic growth. The first appeared in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics in 2012, examining temperature shocks and their effect on economic growth over the previous half century. The second appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2014, surveying what economists had learned from treating weather as an empirical variable. Together they documented how climate shapes the economic life of developing countries. That concern runs through Dell's broader work on why poor regions stay poor.

  Dell has also examined the reverse direction of that relationship. Political and economic conditions, she found, can shape the emergence of conflict just as surely as conflict shapes them.