About

Grant Miller is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and also affiliated with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is a professor, by courtesy, of the Economics Department at Stanford University. Dr. Miller holds a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University, obtained in 2005, a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2000, and a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University, completed in 1995. His research focuses on development and growth policies as well as health care policy, contributing to the understanding of these areas through his academic work and policy analysis.

Research topics

• Economics
• Labour economics
• Medicine
• Development economics
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• IMAP Safety & Mission Assurance Road to Launch & Mission Success

  2026-03-07

  article

  The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission investigates two of the most important issues in space physics today - the acceleration of energetic particles and interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium. This revolutionary mission includes a suite of ten instruments that together resolve fundamental scientific questions. These instruments are provided by nine institutions globally, hosted on an observatory structure integrated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (JHU/APL). IMAP successfully launched on September 24, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 along with NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On Lagrange 1 (SWFO) satellite. Over the course of the development effort the IMAP Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) team has defined and implemented robust processes to ensure requirements are met, risks adequately captured, and ultimately mission success achieved. The launch campaign is a unique time for SMA, as cost and schedule constraints converge while completing complex hardware testing. With respect to the launch campaign itself, and from a hardware and software quality perspective, this paper will present non-conformance management strategies for handling challenges and methods for tracking and controlling final configuration. From a mission systems assurance perspective, we will discuss the SMA role in risk management and acceptance of risk ahead of asserting launch readiness, the role of mission system safety through the launch readiness process, and a retrospective on SMA in an integrated operational environment with multiple rideshares. Lastly, the paper will conclude with lessons learned, reflecting on perceived lessons and risks from earlier development phases of the mission and providing summary recommendations for future missions.

  PublisherDOI

• A Global Analysis of Within-Country Health Inequalities

  JAMA Health Forum · 2025-10-17 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Importance: Health inequalities are a defining social and policy concern. However, understanding whether a specific country's inequalities are large or small is limited without a comparative perspective with other countries. Objective: To systematically compare health inequalities in 181 countries and territories from 1960 to 2021 by developing a Health Inequality Normalized Index (HINI) that does not rely on secondary variables such as income, education, or race and ethnicity. Design, Setting, and Participants: This repeated cross-sectional study including demographic cross-national comparative analysis used age-at-death distributions from life tables for 181 countries and territories from 1960 to 2021. All county and territory health inequalities were ranked, and a random forest analysis was conducted of 191 factors to identify their relative role. Special attention was given to trends in health inequalities in the US. Data were analyzed between October 2023 and January 2025. Exposures: HINI was constructed by placing observed age-at-death distributions between perfect equality (conceptualized as everyone living exactly to the most common age at death) and the worst possible state of inequality (the largest variance in age-at-death distribution observed for each country). Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was the HINI, which measures within-country inequality in age-at-death distribution consistently for all countries and territories. Additional analyses explored the importance of potential factors (eg, infant mortality, wealth inequality, governance quality) associated with health inequalities. Results: Of 181 countries and territories between 1960 and 2021, in 2019 (pre-COVID-19), Turkmenistan had the highest HINI (most unequal), while Hong Kong had the lowest (most equal). Random forest analysis revealed that infant mortality and life expectancy were the primary factors associated with cross-country variation in HINI. Globally, health inequality decreased from 1960 to 2021, consistent with improvements in infant mortality and life expectancy. However, inequality trends diverged by country income group, improving more rapidly in high-income than in low-income countries. In the US, health inequality decreased but less than in other high-income nations: it ranked 19th in 1960 but 77th in 2021 among 181 countries and territories, and 55th among 59 high-income countries. Conclusions and Relevance: Results of this study suggest that infant mortality and life expectancy are critical factors in shaping countries' health inequalities. Sustained improvements in countries with high infant mortality may have the potential to further reduce inequality at a global scale. In the US, comparatively slow progress on health inequality underscores its salience in national health policy discussions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Subjective expectations and demand for contraception

  2025-04-09 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  One-quarter of married, fertile-age women in Sub-Saharan Africa report not wanting a pregnancy and yet do not practice contraception. We collect detailed data on the subjective beliefs of married, adult women not wanting a pregnancy and estimate a structural model of contraceptive choices. Both our structural model and a validation exercise using an exogenous shock to beliefs show that correcting women's beliefs about pregnancy risk absent contraception can increase use considerably. Our structural estimates further indicate that costly interventions like eliminating supply constraints would only modestly increase contraceptive use, while confirming the importance of partners' preferences highlighted in related literature.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Safety & Mission Assurance Approaches During IMAP's Integration & Test

  2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  article

  The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission investigates two of the most important issues in space physics today - the acceleration of energetic particles and interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium. This revolutionary mission includes a suite of ten instruments that together resolve fundamental scientific questions. These instruments are provided by nine institutions globally, hosted on an observatory structure integrated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (JHU/APL). IMAP successfully completed Systems Integration Review (SIR) in September of 2023, and has since completed core bus integration, integration of a number of instruments and begun system testing. During this phase of the project, the Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) role is critical in ensuring that work is performed and executed such that hardware and personnel are protected, nonconformances are accurately captured, understood, and addressed, and that mission requirements are met. This paper intends to provide context to IMAP SMA's broad approach to achieve these goals during integration and test (I&T), and describe in detail what those methods look like in daily execution. Specifically, this paper will include methods implemented for nonconformance documentation and management, transition of SMA support from payload teams to spacecraft teams, day-to-day SMA implementation and support through the environmental test campaign, and completing verification of safety & mission assurance requirements. We will also describe the approach in SMA resource planning to support these critical activities while tailoring for the technical complexity and scope of the mission. Lastly, the paper will conclude with lessons learned, both those incorporated into the approach for IMAP and for future missions.

  PublisherDOI

• Subjective expectations and demand for contraception

  Journal of Econometrics · 2025-04-17 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Nearly one-quarter of married, fertile-age women in Sub-Saharan Africa say that they want to avoid pregnancy but are not using contraceptives. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to study this puzzle in a developing country using detailed data on women's subjective probabilistic beliefs about contraception and contraceptive attributes. Policy counterfactuals based on a structural model suggest that costly interventions such as eliminating supply constraints would only have modest effects on contraceptive use. Alternatively, increasing partners' approval of methods, aligning partners' fertility preferences with women's, and correcting women's expectations about pregnancy risk absent contraception have the potential to increase use considerably. We provide additional empirical support for this last result through a before/after experiment in which we find that simply (and effectively) informing women about underlying pregnancy risk increases stated intentions to use contraception substantially, in line with our initial estimates.

  PublisherDOI

• Bureaucratic Incentives and Effectiveness of the One Child Policy in China

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Reducing emissions and air pollution from informal brick kilns: Evidence from Bangladesh

  Science · 2025-05-08 · 8 citations

  article

  We present results from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that introduced operational practices to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in 276 “zigzag” brick kilns. Of all intervention kilns, 65% adopted the improved practices. Treatment assignment reduced energy use by 10.5% ( P -value <0.001) and decreased CO 2 and PM 2.5 emissions by 171 and 0.45 metric tons, respectively, per kiln per year. Valuing the CO 2 reductions using a social cost of carbon of 185 USD per metric ton, we find that the social benefits outweigh costs by a factor of 65 to 1. The intervention, which required no new capital investment, also decreased fuel costs and increased brick quality. Our results demonstrate the potential for privately profitable, as well as publicly beneficial, improvements to address environmental problems in informal industries.

  PublisherDOI

• The Prevalence and Characteristics of Labor Trafficking in Brazilian Agriculture

  Journal of Human Trafficking · 2025-10-02

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Improving worker conditions in Brick kilns: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Bangladesh

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-09-29

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• The impact of US assimilation and allotment policy on American Indian mortality

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In contrast to earlier US policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the "Indian Problem," the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty-making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)-and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides quantitative evidence on the demographic impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 US population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased the American Indian child mortality ratio by a little more than 15%. In secondary analyses (requiring additional assumptions) focused on total mortality, we find increases among young American Indians of nearly one-third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%). These results confirm contemporary critics' adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jay Bhattacharya

  Stanford University

  58 shared

• Marcos Vera‐Hernández

  University College London

  57 shared

• Vincenzo Atella

  36 shared

• Scott Rozelle

  Stanford University

  33 shared

• Kimberly Singer Babiarz

  33 shared

• Christina Gathmann

  Centre for Economic Policy Research

  29 shared

• Iván Mejía‐Guevara

  28 shared

• Valentina Conti

  28 shared

Education

• PhD, Health Policy

  Harvard University

  2005

• MPP, Public Policy

  Harvard University

  2000

• B.A.

  Yale University

  1995