ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ABHIJIT BANERJEE
Indian-origin MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, his wife and one-time Ph.D student Esther Duflo, and Harvard professor Michael Kremer have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work which has “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice,” it was announced on Monday.
Born in Mumbai in 1961, Bannerjee is one of the leading development economists and is presently working as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Author of a large number of articles and books, Banerjee graduated in science from the Calcutta University in 1981 before moving to the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi from where he completed his MA in 1983. He received his PhD from the Harvard University in 1988.
In 2003, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab’s directors.
Banerjee is a past President of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the NBER and a CEPR research fellow, international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize.
He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including “Poor Economics”, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award in 2011.
He is the editor of three more books and has also directed two documentary films. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s highlevel Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 Development Agenda.
In 2011, Banerjee was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory.
Noted historian Ramachandra Guha said that Banerjee’s ground-breaking scholarship apart, he is also a superb cook and a connoisseur of Hindustani classical music.
“He represents the best of Indian culture and scholarship, while always being open to what the world has to offer,” Guha wrote on Twitter while congratulating the Nobel laureate.
Esther Duflo, born 1972 in Paris, received her PhD in 1999 from MIT.
In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies.
She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance. Duflo's first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
With Banerjee, she co-authored the book, 'Poor Economics'.