Michael Clemens

Michael A. Clemens is a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2023. He studies the economic causes and effects of migration all over the world. For 20 years prior he built the research program on international migration at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. He is also affiliated with the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany; the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration in the department of economics at University College London; and the Center for Global Development. Clemens has a long record of influential academic publications including in the American Economic Review, and his research has won the Royal Economic Society Prize. He has worked with the governments of both high-income and low-income countries around the world, as well as with a variety of international agencies, to design and evaluate innovations in migration policy. He received his PhD from the department of economics at Harvard University, specializing in economic history, public economics, and development economics.