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Portrait of Michael Kremer
Photo: Harvard University, Harvard University Profile · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences · 2019

Michael Kremer

He brought randomized trials into the fight against poverty, testing what really helps poor children learn, stay healthy and survive.

The Nobel citation: “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”
Born
November 12, 1964, New York, NY, USA
Shared with
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo
Affiliation at the time
Harvard University, USA

Economics prize

2019

Shared with 2 other laureates.

Age that year

55years

Born in 1964.

Headline credited impact

36,000–48,000lives saved

Child deaths averted by pneumococcal vaccines in Gavi-supported countries, 2010-2025. How it was built

Sources cited

24

Fact-checked September 24, 2026.

  • The Nobel Foundation's profile notes that he descends from Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. His mother wrote books on Holocaust literature.
  • After college he taught for a year at a rural secondary school in Kenya, then co-founded WorldTeach to send volunteer teachers to poorer countries.
  • In a Kenyan trial, a fee of under 40 US cents per child for deworming pills cut take-up from about 70% to 17%.
  • When a friend in Sweden messaged that they urgently needed to speak to him, he first suspected phishing. The message was about his Nobel Prize.
  • Gavi estimates that by the end of 2019 more than 215 million children had been immunized with pneumococcal vaccine backed by the $1.5 billion fund he helped conceive.

The breakthrough

Testing anti-poverty ideas with randomized experiments in the field

Governments and charities spend billions of dollars to fight poverty, but for a long time they rarely knew which programs worked. Simply comparing schools that had textbooks with schools that did not misleads, because richer areas tend to have both more books and better students. In 1994 Kremer suggested a fix to a friend at a small education charity in western Kenya: since the charity could not reach every school at once, let chance decide which schools went first, just as a medical trial randomly decides who gets a new drug. Think of it as a fair coin toss. Because the groups are alike on average at the start, any later difference can be credited to the program. The results surprised people. Extra textbooks did not raise average test scores and mainly helped pupils who were already the strongest, and free school meals had only small effects on learning. Giving children pills against intestinal worms cut school absences by roughly a quarter, and even helped untreated children nearby, because fewer worms were spreading. Charging parents even a tiny fee for the pills drove many families away. Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo turned such experiments into the standard way to test anti-poverty policies. Kremer also works on the economics of invention. With Rachel Glennerster he proposed the advance market commitment, in which donors promise in advance to buy a new vaccine for poor countries if one is developed.[2],[3],[4],[5]

“innovations in social institutions designed to accelerate scientific and technological change and orient it toward human needs”
Michael Kremer, Describing the 'meta-innovations' he hopes for, in his Nobel Prize lecture, Stockholm, 8 December 2019.[4]

What it meant for humanity

Kremer's work changed how aid money is spent. Before the experimental approach spread, many programs were judged by good intentions or loose comparisons. Now governments and charities test ideas on a small scale, keep what works and drop what does not. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, said this experimental approach had taken over the field of development economics. Some of his own findings reached very large numbers of people. After his deworming studies, Kenya's government scaled up school deworming nationwide, and states in India and then India's national government followed. Evidence Action's Deworm the World program says it has helped deliver more than 2 billion deworming treatments to children since 2014. A follow-up of the original Kenyan children up to 20 years later, co-written by Kremer, found that those given two to three extra years of treatment were spending 14% more as adults and earning 13% more per hour, though the size of deworming's benefits is disputed. His pricing studies showed that even tiny fees drive poor families away from preventive care. The WHO now recommends free deworming medicine for schoolchildren in heavily affected areas. The advance market commitment he proposed with Rachel Glennerster became a $1.5 billion pilot for pneumococcal vaccines, and more than 215 million children had been vaccinated through it by the end of 2019. At the time, pneumococcal disease killed about 1.6 million people a year. Other projects he helped start include chlorine dispensers placed at village water sources, USAID's Development Innovation Ventures, and Precision Development, which texts farming advice to smallholder farmers. The World Bank says programs informed by his work on digital farm advice and weather forecasting reach more than 50 million people in Africa and South Asia.

  • Kenya scaled up school deworming nationally after his research, and Indian states and India's national government adopted similar programs. Deworm the World says it has helped deliver more than 2 billion treatments since 2014.[4],[9],[18]
  • In a follow-up study Kremer co-wrote, Kenyans who received two to three extra years of childhood deworming had 14% higher consumption and 13% higher hourly earnings up to 20 years later.[17]
  • In 2007 donors pledged $1.5 billion for a pilot advance market commitment for pneumococcal vaccines, based on the proposal Kremer and Glennerster set out in Strong Medicine (2004).[4],[11]
  • Gavi estimates that pneumococcal vaccines averted about 1.2 million deaths in Gavi-supported countries from 2009 to 2023. The advance market commitment was one of several factors behind their fast rollout.[11],[13]
  • USAID's Development Innovation Ventures, which he co-founded in 2010, has invested in more than 300 innovations that reach more than 200 million people, according to the World Bank.[9],[10]

Impact in numbers

Kremer's largest contribution is a method and a culture. Before the mid-1990s, development economists mostly worked from theory and existing data. Kremer and his colleagues showed that researchers could run careful experiments with charities and governments, learn from people's everyday choices, and use each result to design the next test. The approach spread to thousands of studies and to aid agencies that now fund programs based on evidence of what works. Its benefits are spread across countless policy decisions and cannot honestly be added up. We count only two outcomes with published figures: pneumococcal vaccines in the poorest countries, which his advance market commitment helped deliver faster, and school deworming programs built on his research. The deworming figure counts children reached, not proven benefits, because the size of those benefits is disputed. We do not count chlorine dispensers, digital farm advice, Development Innovation Ventures or his COVID-19 vaccine advice.

EconomyHealthEducation

Each number is the laureate’s credited share of a real-world outcome, cumulative to 2025. The whole outcome, the share of credit, and the reasoning are shown so you can check the arithmetic. Outcomes shared with other laureates are counted once on the impact page.

  • Medium confidenceDirectModeledHealth

    Child deaths averted by pneumococcal vaccines in Gavi-supported countries, 2010-2025

    36,000–48,000

    lives saved, credited share

    That is 3% of 1.2–1.6 million lives saved since 2010.

    How this number was built

    Gavi: over 570,000 deaths averted by end-2019 and about 1.2 million by end-2023 (~160,000 a year in 2020-23). Adding 2024-25 at 130,000-200,000 a year gives ~1.46-1.6 million; low keeps the published 1.2 million to allow for model uncertainty and COVID-era coverage losses. Share 0.03: Gavi's evaluation says the AMC sped up supply and uptake but had very little effect on R&D, and results cannot be credited to it alone (PneumoADIP, Gavi funding, WHO advice). We credit the AMC with ~15% of deaths averted and Kremer with ~20% of the AMC (co-proposed with Glennerster; donors, Gavi, the World Bank and manufacturers built it): 0.15 x 0.2 = 0.03.[4],[11],[12],[13]

    Sources: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; NobelPrize.org (The Nobel Foundation)

  • Low confidenceDirectModeledHealth

    Children given deworming treatment in government programs supported by Deworm the World, 2014-2025

    8.5–18.5

    million people benefited, credited share

    That is 5% of 170–370 million people benefited since 2014.

    How this number was built

    Evidence Action: over 2 billion treatments since 2014 (198 million in 2024); we take 2.0-2.2 billion through 2025. Converting to children: India's program treats ages 1-19 twice a year, Kenya's once. Over a 12-year window a 19-year age band spans 30 birth cohorts and 228 cohort-years, about 7.6 eligible years per cohort. With once- or twice-yearly rounds and incomplete coverage we assume 6-12 treatments per child: 2.0 billion / 12 = ~170 million; 2.2 billion / 6 = ~370 million. This counts children reached, not proven gains: Cochrane finds no clear average effect on height, haemoglobin or school performance, while a 20-year Kenyan follow-up co-written by Kremer found higher earnings. Share 0.05: WHO already recommended school deworming; governments deliver the drugs; firms donate them; Evidence Action runs support. Kremer's research and co-founding role get a small part.[4],[16],[17],[18]

    Sources: Evidence Action; NobelPrize.org (The Nobel Foundation); Cochrane / PubMed; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / PubMed

The double edge

Kremer's work is not linked to any mass harm, but several parts of it are disputed. The best-known is the so-called worm wars. In 2015 independent re-analyses found coding errors in his landmark 2004 deworming paper with Edward Miguel, and Cochrane reviews concluded that mass deworming does not appear to improve children's height, haemoglobin (a blood measure), thinking skills or school performance. Supporters such as GiveWell answered that the long-run earnings evidence still made cheap deworming worth funding. The vaccine fund he conceived saved lives, but Médecins Sans Frontières argued that it paid Pfizer and GSK too much, and an independent evaluation found that it did little to speed up vaccine research itself. Critics of randomized trials in poor countries raise questions of consent and ethics. They also argue that the method favors small fixes over large structural change. The chlorine dispenser program he helped design turned out to reach far fewer people than its operator had reported. Its shortfall in Uganda and Malawi was documented by an independent evaluation run by his own research lab.

  • Moderate

    The 'worm wars' over deworming evidence

    In 2015 re-analyses by Aiken, Davey and colleagues found coding errors in Miguel and Kremer's 2004 study; the corrected estimate of benefits spilling over to other schools was no longer statistically significant, though effects within 3 km held up. Cochrane reviews in 2015 and 2019 found no clear gain in height, haemoglobin, cognition or school results. Kremer co-wrote the main long-run earnings study and was a Deworm the World board member. GiveWell kept recommending deworming.[15],[16],[17]

  • Moderate

    Vaccine fund criticized as overpaying drug giants

    Of the $1.5 billion pneumococcal fund, Pfizer and GSK received almost $1.2 billion in subsidies by 2019, plus $2.6 billion from vaccine sales to Gavi. MSF urged Gavi to stop the payments. Gavi's independent evaluation found the fund had very little influence on vaccine research timelines, though it did speed supply and uptake.[11],[14]

  • Minor

    Ethical and methodological critiques of trials on the poor

    Critics argue that experiments in poor communities often lack real informed consent, because whole schools or clinics are assigned at once and very poor participants may not feel free to refuse. They also argue that the method narrows policy toward small interventions and that results may not hold at scale.[20]

  • Minor

    Chlorine dispenser reach was overstated

    In 2026 Evidence Action reported that an independent evaluation found about 70% fewer people in Uganda and Malawi had chlorine in their water than its monitoring had shown. It is ending operations in Malawi and scaling back in Uganda. The evaluation was run by the Development Innovation Lab, which Kremer directs.[5],[19]

Against the odds

Kremer did not face persecution, and no source records him meeting antisemitism. His family's story shows the world his grandparents left behind. They came from Poland and from the Austrian-ruled part of Poland. Between 1918 and 1920, pogrom-like violence in Galicia and western Belarus killed tens of thousands of Jews. America then closed its doors: the 1924 immigration law set very low quotas for eastern Europeans, a policy the US Holocaust Memorial Museum says reflected antisemitic feeling. By 1929, Poland, with about 3.5 million Jews, had an annual quota of just 6,524 immigrants. Most Polish Jews who stayed were murdered in the Holocaust, between 2.77 and 3 million people. His mother spent her career studying how writers bear witness to that catastrophe. Elite universities had also once limited Jewish admissions: Harvard, Columbia and Yale began doing so around the 1920s. By the time Kremer studied at Harvard in the early 1980s, those limits were long past. His own hardships were of a different kind. He chose to live and work in rural Kenya after college and caught malaria while traveling there, an experience that drew him to the problem of vaccines for poor countries.

  • —

    Persecution

    Context: his grandparents emigrated from Poland and Austrian-ruled Poland. Pogrom-like violence in Galicia and western Belarus killed tens of thousands of Jews in 1918-1920, and 2.77 to 3 million Polish Jews were later murdered in the Holocaust.[1],[6],[23],[24]

  • 1924

    Discrimination

    Context: the US Immigration Act of 1924 set very low quotas for eastern Europeans and reflected antisemitic sentiment. By 1929 Poland, with about 3.5 million Jews, had an annual quota of 6,524.[22]

  • —

    Quota

    Context rather than a barrier he met: Harvard, Columbia and Yale began restricting Jewish admissions around the 1920s and did not admit many more Jews until the 1960s. Kremer graduated from Harvard in 1985.[6],[21]

  • —

    Other

    He caught malaria while traveling in Kenya, which drew him to the economics of developing vaccines for poor countries.[6]

Jewish background

Both parents JewishCulturally Jewish

Kremer's parents, Eugene and Sara Lillian Kremer, were both children of Jewish immigrants: her family came from Poland, his from Austrian-ruled Poland. The Nobel Foundation's profile calls him a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. He grew up near Kansas State University, where his father taught architecture and his mother taught English. She became a scholar of Jewish American and Holocaust literature and wrote two books on how writers portray the Holocaust. Kremer says she taught him that people must act against suffering and injustice that can be prevented, and calls this the main reason for his work. We found no public statement from him about religious practice.[1],[5],[6],[7],[8]

Key dates

  1. November 12, 1964

    Born in New York City to Eugene and Sara Lillian Kremer, both children of Jewish immigrants. He grows up near Kansas State University.[1],[5],[6]

  2. 1985

    Graduates from Harvard in social studies, then spends a year teaching at a secondary school in Kenya and co-founds WorldTeach.[5],[6],[10]

  3. 1992

    Earns his PhD in economics at Harvard with a dissertation on long-run economic growth.[1],[6]

  4. 1993

    Publishes the O-ring theory of development and a study of population and technology since 1 million BC; joins MIT's faculty.[6],[7]

  5. 1994

    On a visit to Kenya, suggests that a friend's education charity choose schools at random so it can measure its impact, the start of his field experiments.[4],[5]

  6. 1997

    Receives a MacArthur Fellowship.[6],[7]

  7. 1999

    Joins Harvard's economics department, where he becomes Gates Professor of Developing Societies in 2003.[1],[6],[7]

  8. 2004

    Publishes the deworming study with Edward Miguel and the book Strong Medicine with Rachel Glennerster, which proposes advance market commitments for vaccines.[4],[6]

  9. 2007

    Donors pledge $1.5 billion for a pilot advance market commitment for pneumococcal vaccines.[4],[11]

  10. 2010

    Becomes scientific director of Development Innovation Ventures, a USAID fund he co-founded.[6],[10]

  11. October 14, 2019

    Awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo 'for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty'.[1],[2]

  12. 2020

    Moves to the University of Chicago as a University Professor and advises the US government on COVID-19 vaccine financing before Operation Warp Speed.[5]

  13. September 16, 2026

    Named World Bank Group chief economist, effective 1 October 2026.[9]

Sources

  1. 1.Michael Kremer – Facts – 2019 · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach), 2019
  2. 2.Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019 · Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / NobelPrize.org, 2019
  3. 3.Popular science background: Research to help the world's poor · Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / NobelPrize.org, 2019
  4. 4.Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics (Prize Lecture, 8 December 2019) · NobelPrize.org (The Nobel Foundation), 2019
  5. 5.How Michael Kremer is transforming global research in development economics · University of Chicago News, 2022
  6. 6.Michael Kremer · Wikipedia
  7. 7.Michael Kremer (1964 - ) · Jewish Virtual Library
  8. 8.Kremer, S. Lillian 1939- (Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series) · Encyclopedia.com / Gale
  9. 9.Michael Kremer Appointed as World Bank Group Chief Economist · World Bank, 2026
  10. 10.Harvard's Michael Kremer recognized with Nobel in economics · Harvard Gazette, 2019
  11. 11.Pneumococcal AMC pilot outcomes and impact evaluation · Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
  12. 12.Advance Market Commitment for Pneumococcal Vaccines: Annual Report 1 January-31 December 2020 · Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, 2021
  13. 13.Pneumonia: a VaccinesWork briefing · Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, 2024
  14. 14.Gavi should stop awarding special funds to Pfizer and GSK for pneumonia vaccine · Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign, 2019
  15. 15.New deworming reanalyses and Cochrane review · The GiveWell Blog, 2015
  16. 16.Public health deworming programmes for soil-transmitted helminths in children living in endemic areas (Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2019) · Cochrane / PubMed, 2019
  17. 17.Twenty-year economic impacts of deworming (PNAS 2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / PubMed, 2021
  18. 18.Deworm the World · Evidence Action
  19. 19.Following the evidence, even when it's hard: An update on chlorine dispensers in Uganda and Malawi · Evidence Action, 2026
  20. 20.Randomised trials in economics: what the critics have to say · The Conversation (Grieve Chelwa, Nimi Hoffmann, Seán Muller), 2019
  21. 21.How the Ivy League's Jewish quotas shaped higher education · Inside Higher Ed, 2022
  22. 22.United States Immigration and Refugee Law, 1921-1980 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
  23. 23.Pogroms · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
  24. 24.Jewish Losses during the Holocaust: By Country · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia

Fact-checked on September 24, 2026 by a separate AI fact-checking pass that re-opened the sources, with 8 corrections made. How we check

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