David N. Weil

David Nathan Weil (born 1961) is the James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics at Brown University. Weil's scholarship has focused on economic growth and demographic economics. Between 2015 and 2018, Weil chaired Brown's Department of Economics.

Education and research
Weil received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Brown University in 1982. He completed his doctorate in economics at Harvard University in 1990.

Weil's most widely cited paper is "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth" coauthored with Gregory Mankiw and David Romer and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1992. The paper argues that the Solow growth model, once augmented to include a role for human capital, does a reasonably good job of explaining international differences in standards of living. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 20,000 times, making it one of the most cited articles in the field of economics.

Weil is also a co-author alongside J. Vernon Henderson and Adam Storeygard of the paper "Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space" published in American Economic Review in 2012, which firstly explored the possibility of using satellite data on night lights as a proxy to measure economic growth without relying on official figures, and built a statistical framework for it. The paper has been cited almost 3,000 times.