Melissa Dell

Melissa Dell won the 2020 John Bates Clark Medal for her groundbreaking contributions to the fields of economic history and development economics. The American Economic Association awarded her the medal for using detailed historical data and computational methods to understand how institutions shape economic outcomes. She was only the third woman to ever receive this prestigious honor.

In her research on the Mexican Drug War, Melissa Dell used geocoded data to analyze how the government's crackdown on drug cartels affected local violence and political outcomes. Her findings demonstrated that closely contested mayoral elections in regions favorable to the ruling National Action Party (PAN) led to significant spikes in drug-related violence.

Melissa Dell is known for combining economic theory with sophisticated machine learning and digitized archival records. She has transcribed massive datasets from centuries-old documents to track the long-term economic impacts of institutions. For example, she used historical maps to study the long-term effects of the Vietnamese civil service exams on modern-day economic prosperity.

Melissa Dell is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard University. She is deeply affiliated with the university's empirical economics and applied econometrics research groups. She completed her own PhD in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining the Harvard faculty.