Michael Carter

Michael R. Carter is a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis and an Honorary Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He is the director of the USAID-supported Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience and founding director of the Resilience+ Innovation Facility at UC Davis. He is a fellow of the NBER, BREAD and the American Agricultural Economics Association.

His research examines poverty dynamics and productive social safety nets, the impact of violence on aspirations and hope, small farm uptake of improved technologies, and features a suite of projects that design, pilot and evaluate index insurance contracts as mechanisms to alleviate chronic poverty. Carter is a fellow of NBER, BREAD and the American Agricultural Economics Association, and has served on advisory boards for numerous academic journals and international development NGOs. He is co-editor of The Economics of Poverty Traps (U. of Chicago, 2018).