[4] In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee,[5] "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

[12] He left high school a year early to attend Harvard University,[11] where he received his AB in Social Studies in 1985, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Kremer has helped establish the effectiveness of randomized controlled trials to test proposed antipoverty measures.

[27] The scheme, run by non-profit Evidence Action, was ranked a GiveWell top charity from 2013 to 2022, considered among the best in the world for social impact per marginal dollar spent.

[30][31] The program promotes a venture capital approach to development finance, prioritizing rapid distribution of grants and scale-up of policies successful in pilot stages.

[33] The program increased yields by 8%,[33] inspiring Kremer to co-found Precision Development (PxD), a non-profit organization building digital information services for the world's poor.

[37] In a 2004 book with his wife, Rachel Glennerster,[38] Kremer advocates for the creation of advance market commitments, in which governments enter into legally binding agreements with pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, promising to purchase given quantities of vaccines or medications provided they meet certain benchmarks for safety and efficacy.

[39] In response to Kremer's research, a consortium of donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and national governments such as Canada, Italy, and Norway pledged $1.5 billion as an advance market commitment for pneumococcal vaccines.

Chris Blattman, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, has described Kremer as one of the world's "leading thinkers on incentives for creating new vaccine research.

Among his earliest contributions was the O-ring theory of economic development,[18] named for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, in which a cascading failure was caused by the malfunctioning of a single small component.

[46] Kremer's work on the O-ring theory was inspired by his time in Kenya, when he organized a training session for WorldTeach volunteers, but forgot to purchase toilet paper for the event.

In a paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics,[47] Kremer empirically tests the hypotheses of macroeconomic models predicting a positive relationship between population levels and technological innovation because of the non-rivalry of ideas.

[37][51] The policy value of Kremer and Morcom’s work was criticized by Erwin H. Bulte and co-authors, who argue in a reply in the American Economic Review that government ownership of ivory may incentivize the preemptive extermination of endangered species, thereby allowing stores to be legally sold under CITES.

In work with Karthik Muralidharan, Jeffrey Hammer, Halsey Rogers, and Nazmul Chaudhury,[57] Kremer shows via unannounced visits to Indian public schools that teacher absenteeism sits at 25%, varying from 15% in Maharashtra to 42% in Jharkhand.

[58][59] In wider work covering Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru, and Uganda,[60] Kremer and co-authors show that health worker absenteeism averages 35% across countries.

He and Rachel Glennerster have been leading proponents of advance market commitments, legally binding agreements in which governments agree to purchase a given quantity of a vaccine or other item at a profitable price, provided it meets certain standards for efficacy and safety.

[65] In a 2020 working paper,[66] Kremer, Jonathan Levin, and Christopher Tucker review the economic case for AMCs, showing theoretically that they can effectively prevent the hold-up problem that emerges when pharmaceutical firms cannot bargain on prices until after vaccines or other drugs are developed.

[67] Advance market commitments have been suggested as a means of spurring investment across a wide variety of industries, including pharmaceuticals,[39] carbon removal,[68][69] and renewable energy.

"[72] In 2019, Kremer was chosen as the co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee of MIT[2] "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

[76] Writing of their decision to do so, Kremer noted that "Abhijit, Esther and I truly believe that our Nobel Prize is an award for the development economics community, and we wanted to invest it in a way that provides new opportunities for research.