Costas Meghir

Costas Meghir

Research Fellow

Joined RFBerlin as a Research Fellow in June 2026

Research area
Labor Economics Child Development Economics of Education Intergenerational transmission Crime

About Costas Meghir

Costas Meghir is the “Douglas A. Warner III” Professor of Economics at Yale University. He obtained his Ph.D. from Manchester University. He is an elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow of the Econometric Society, the British Academy, the Society for Labor Economics; a Research Associate of the NBER; and a J-Pal affiliate. He was awarded the Ragnar Frisch medal by the Econometric Society in 2000 and the Bodosakis foundation prize in 1997. He has been co-editor of Econometrica and joint managing editor of the Economic Journal. He was a member of the Pissarides commission laying out the policy options for reforming the Greek economy and co-edited an MIT press book on the same subject. His current research is focused on women’s labor supply and welfare programs, the economics of the family including marriage markets and intrahousehold allocation of resources, on informal labor markets, wage determination and the role of the firm, and on human capital and early childhood development (ECD). He is involved in designing and testing scalable ECD interventions by RCT in both developing countries and the US. He has implemented and evaluated early childhood interventions in Colombia and more recently in India involving children from birth to age 5. Currently he is working on an ECD intervention in Tanzania, where mothers have been recruited during pregnancy and with the intervention commencing soon after the birth of the child. He also led the design, implementation and evaluation by RCT of a major pre-school program in Kenya, aimed at improving both child outcomes and women’s labor market opportunities. The common thread of this work is to understand human capital formation and how people respond to incentives so as to identify policy interventions that can reduce poverty and inequality and improve intergenerational upward mobility.

Discussion papers

July 2026

Life After Divorce: Effects of Joint Custody on Parents and Children

Stella Canessa, Gordon Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Mårten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao