Melissa Dell

Melissa Dell
Born	1983 or 1984 (age 40–41) Enid, Oklahoma
Alma mater	Oklahoma Bible Academy Harvard College Oxford University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards	Truman 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
Fields	Economics
Institutions	Harvard University
Doctoral advisors	Daron Acemoglu
Website	https://scholar.harvard.edu/dell/home

Melissa Dell (born 1983 or 1984) is an economist and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.

In 2014, the International Monetary Fund named Dell among the 25 Brightest Young Economists. In 2018, she was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize and The Economist named her one of "the decade’s eight best young economists." She was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2020.

Biography

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. She was the first student from her high school to attend Harvard University, and established an organization, "College Matters," and 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) 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 member 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

Melissa Dell's research interests include development economics, economic history and political economy. Her work has mainly focused on explaining economic development through the persistence of historical institutions and climate. She has also investigated the effect of conflict on labor market and political outcomes and vice versa. Much of her research has focused on Latin America and Southeast Asia. She was one of the first economists to use a spatial regression discontinuity design, in her paper on the long-term effects of Peru's Mining Mita.

Selected works

• Dell (2010). "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita". Econometrica. 78 (6): 1863–1903. doi:10.3982/ecta8121.
• Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. "Temperature shocks and economic growth: Evidence from the last half century." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 4, no. 3 (2012): 66-95.
• Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. "What do we learn from the weather? The new climate-economy literature." Journal of Economic Literature 52, no. 3 (2014): 740-98.
• Dell, Melissa. "Trafficking networks and the Mexican drug war." American Economic Review 105, no. 6 (2015): 1738-79.
• Dell, Melissa, and Pablo Querubin. "Nation building through foreign intervention: Evidence from discontinuities in military strategies." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 701-764.