Alongside Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Dean Karlan, and Michael Kremer, Miguel has pioneered the use of randomized controlled trials and other forms of impact evaluation to test the effects of social interventions in the developing world.

The network currently includes over 160 affiliated faculty at UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, UCSD, and a number of other universities based on the west coast of the United States.

CEGA supports research in development economics that leverages randomized controlled trials or other rigorous methods aimed at evaluating the causal effect of interventions on health and well-being in low and middle income countries.

He has pursued research on a range of topics within these fields, including the effects of environmental shocks and extreme weather on conflict and violence, global health, corruption, energy and electrification, the impacts of cash transfers, the economy of aging, and transparency in social science.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Miguel collaborated with Kremer on a randomized controlled trial aimed at evaluating the direct and spillover effects of a school-based deworming program on education and health in rural Kenya.

[20][21] In 2020, Miguel released a paper alongside Kremer, Joan Hamory, Michael Walker, and Sarah Baird documenting the long-term effects of the program on earnings, educational attainment, and employment.

[22] In 2013, Miguel and Kremer allowed an independent research team based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to re-evaluate the original dataset and methods used to produce their initial results.

They found and documented several errors in the original work, including a substantial amount of missing data and an incorrectly reported claim that school-based deworming reduced anemia in treated children.

[32] Alongside Burke, John Dykema, Shanker Satyanath, and David Lobell, Miguel also has an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[33] showing that historically, the risk of armed conflict in a given country in Sub-Saharan Africa in a year is strongly correlated with the presence of extreme temperatures.

Alongside Halvor Mehlum and Ragnar Torvik, Miguel published an article in the Journal of Urban Economics[35] examining the effects of rising crop prices on property crime in 19th century Bavaria.

[36] Using rainfall as a source of random variation in rye yields, they show that grain prices are strongly correlated with rates of property crime, which Bavaria kept meticulous records of.

[36] In a similar spirit, Miguel shows in a paper in the Review of Economic Studies[37] that during droughts and floods, elderly women in rural Tanzania are substantially more likely to be murdered by close relatives, in line with beliefs that witchcraft may be responsible for adverse weather.

In 2022, Miguel published the results of a randomized controlled trial examining the direct and general equilibrium effects of unconditional cash transfers on village economies in rural Kenya.

[39] Miguel published the results of the GiveDirectly evaluation in Econometrica,[42] alongside co-authors Paul Niehaus, Michael Walker, Dennis Egger, and Johannes Haushofer.

Prior to 2002, United Nations diplomats based in New York City were essentially immune from parking violations, with vehicles ticketed but rarely towed.

[46] In a 2006 paper with Raymond Fisman, then of Columbia University, Miguel evaluated the distribution of parking tickets across countries in an effort to shed light on the relative importance of norms and legal enforcement in shaping anti-social behavior and lawfulness.

[51] In 2019, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, Miguel's doctoral supervisor and co-author, for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

"[1] The official scientific background for the award cited Miguel and CEGA as key additional actors linking "experimental research to policy change and advice.