Meta-Analysis and Reproducibility in Economics Research

Garret Christensen is a Financial Economist in the Division of Insurance and Research at the FDIC. His research interests include housing and consumer finance, poverty programs, and meta-science and reproducibility. Before joining the FDIC, Garret was an Economist with the US Census Bureau, a BIDS Data Science Fellow, and a research fellow with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), a program of the Center for Effective Global Action. He also taught economics at Swarthmore College and conducted water, sanitation, and hygiene research in western Kenya. He received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has since conducted research for the WASH Benefits public health randomized trial for Innovations for Poverty Action and Emory University and has taught economics at Swarthmore College. 

BIDS Senior Fellow Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), and the Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000. His research focuses on African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. Miguel earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow.