Jean Ensminger is an economic anthropologist whose research sits at the interface of anthropology, economics, political science, and development. She has conducted four decades of research in one African society. Her early work traced the origins of a market economy. This was followed by two decades of work in experimental economics. Her current research focuses on corruption in development, including aid, and the ethnography of corruption in a rural African setting.

Ensminger has conducted a long-term study of one African society spanning four decades (Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society, Cambridge University Press). Her early work in the political economy of development used insights from new institutional economics and analyzed property rights, transaction costs, principal-agent relations, and the relationship between economic incentives and a range of social and economic behaviors.

Beginning in the early 2000's, Ensminger was co-principal investigator, with Joseph Henrich, of the Roots of Human Sociality Project, which used economic experiments in small-scale societies around the world to understand the co-evolution of market institutions and pro-social norms of fairness, trust, cooperation, and norm enforcement. This work appeared in Science (2006 and 2010) and in two volumes, the last of which was published in 2014 (Experimenting with Social Norms: Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Russell Sage Foundation).

She taught for many years at Washington University in St. Louis before moving to Caltech in 2000. She is a past president of the Society for Economic Anthropology and served as chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech from 2002 to 2006. In 2006–2007 she was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and in 2011 she was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.