Michael Kremer, a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria, was born in New York in the United States. His mother was a professor of literature. Kremer studied at Harvard University, receiving a doctorate in economics there in 1992. He then worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became a professor at Harvard University in 1999, where he works.

One of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. It involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions. Since the mid-1990s, they have been able to test a range of interventions in different areas using field experiments, for example for improving educational outcomes or child health.