Grant Miller

Grant Miller is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. 

Miller’s primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. His work has been published in numerous journals including the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, the Lancet Global Health, and the American Economic Journal. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MPP and PhD from Harvard University.

King Center Supported Research

2025- 2026 Academic Year | Senior Faculty Research Grant

The Unintended Human Cost of Global Conservation: Modern Slavery in Brazil’s Arc of Deforestation

The proposed research focuses on the intersection of environmental conservation and global health, specifically the potential interactions between policy to curb deforestation and anti-trafficking law in Brazil’s Arc of Deforestation. Brazil is a regional hotspot for both illegal deforestation and human trafficking for modern slavery, driven by and most concentrated in the cattle ranching sector. The remote and isolated nature of the Arc of Deforestation means that both illegal deforestation and human trafficking are nearly impossible to monitor and interdict. In response, policymakers have pursued legally binding agreements with large, export-oriented slaughterhouses, offering green certifications (and thus access to global markets) in exchange for their commitment to source cattle from ranchers compliant with environmental and labor standards.  Evidence suggests that these agreements have largely been effective in limiting deforestation, but their impact on trafficking behavior is unknown. Because environmental compliance is more easily monitored than compliance with anti-trafficking law, the impact of these agreements on trafficking behavior may depend on whether labor conditions and environmental conservation function as complements or substitutes. Under asymmetric monitoring capacity, it is possible these agreements may have unintended negative consequences for workers if producers increase worker exploitation to offset the cost of environmental compliance. Our proposed study first measures these potential unintended consequences on labor trafficking across six beef producing Brazilian states, and then explores whether a new, Stanford-developed supply chain tracing tool can be effectively adapted to reduce human trafficking under these agreements. Findings will inform a future large-scale RCT.

2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding

SEWA Wage Loss Insurance Experiment: Evaluating the Sustainability and Scalability of an Insurance Product to Protect against Wage Loss

This project examines a novel insurance product that compensates people for lost wages when they must skip work to get hospital treatment. Existing health insurance plans do not compensate for this loss of income, which discourages utilization.  We conducted an RCT that varies prices for two wage insurance products for 9,948 households in rural Gujarat to estimate consumer demand and how adverse selection affects the cost of providing wage insurance. We also estimate impacts on healthcare utilization and health. Our study will determine whether and at what price our NGO partner offers these products across 18 states in India.