Melissa Dell is a professor in the Economics Department and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on long-run economic development, primarily in Latin America and Asia. She has examined the impacts of weather on economic growth and is currently conducting research about the long-run effects of agrarian reform and agricultural technology investments in Mexico and East Asia. She received a PhD in Economics from MIT, a masters degree in Economics from Oxford, and a BA from Harvard College.