Michael Callen is Assistant Professor of Economics and Strategic Management at UC San Diego. His research uses experiments to identify ways to address accountability and service delivery failures in the public sector, working primarily in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. His primary interests are political economy, development economics, and experimental economics.

Before coming to the Rady School, Callen was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a post doc, Callen was a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action and the UC San Diego Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Callen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his B.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.