Michael Clemens is one of the world’s foremost experts on the economic causes and effects of migration.

His research focuses on migration and development, economic growth, aid effectiveness, and economic history, with particular expertise in analyzing how international migration affects people in destination countries, origin countries, and migrants themselves. Clemens has worked in government, universities, and think tanks to build knowledge and innovative policy to shape global migration. 

Clemens’s research has produced groundbreaking insights into migration economics, earning him the prestigious Royal Economic Society Prize and publication in top-tier journals including the American Economic Review, and serves on the editorial board of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives. He has also pioneered innovations in migration regulation, including the idea of Global Skill Partnerships (GSPs)—a framework for agreements between countries to shape high-skill migration for shared benefit, endorsed by 154 countries in the UN Global Compact for Migration and by the World Bank. He has served in the US federal government as an advisor to both the executive and judicial branches on the effects of immigration policy. He has also worked within international organizations and worked with governments around the world to design and evaluate innovations in migration policy.  

Clemens earned his PhD from Harvard University’s Department of Economics, specializing in economic history, public economics, and development economics. He serves as a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. His extensive institutional affiliations include research fellowships at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics at LISER in Luxembourg, and the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London and RFBerlin. For two decades, he built and led the research program on international migration at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he remains a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow. He has previously served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and World Development. Previously, he held positions as a full professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University, as an affiliated associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, and as a visiting scholar at New York University, while also serving as a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program.