Michèle Tertilt is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mannheim. She is also a Director of the Review of Economic Studies and a Research Professor at the Deutsche Bundesbank, a fellow of the Econometric Society, CEPR, BREAD, EUDN, CESifo and IZA. Prior to joining the University of Mannheim, Michèle Tertilt was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University and she holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. She also spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania and a year as a Hoover National Fellow.
Her research concentrates on macroeconomics with a special focus on development and intra-family interactions. In her work she has connected polygyny with poverty in Africa, explored the evolution of women's rights, and analyzed policies to curb HIV. She has also studied consumer credit and bankruptcies. Her recent work on the effect of Covid19 on gender equality has received a lot of attention in the media. To study these issues, she combines complex economic equilibrium models with empirical and economic-historical investigations. Her research has been published in many highly ranked journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been financed through multiple research grants, including an ERC grant (2013–2018), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2009–2011) and multiple NSF grants. For her work, she has received the Gossenpreis (2013), the Yrjö Jahnsson Award (2017) and most recently the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award (2019).