Esther Duflo is a French-American economist who, with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for helping to develop an innovative experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Duflo, Banerjee, and Kremer, often working with one another, focused on relatively small and specific problems that contributed to poverty and identified their best solutions through carefully designed field experiments, which they conducted in several low- and middle-income countries over the course of more than two decades. They also explored methods for generalizing the results of particular experiments to larger populations, different geographic regions, and different implementing authorities (e.g., non-governmental organizations [NGOs] and local or national governments), among other variables. Their fieldwork led to successful public policy recommendations and transformed the field of development economics (see economic development), where their approach and methods became standard. Duflo was the youngest person, and only the second woman, to receive the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Duflo earned maitrise degrees (approximately equivalent to four-year bachelor's degrees) in economics and history at the École Normale Supérieure (1994); a master's degree in economics from DELTA, an association of French research centres in economics that later merged with other groups to form the Paris School of Economics (1995); and a doctoral degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; 1999). She spent almost all of her teaching career at MIT, where she was eventually (2005) appointed the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. In 2003 she and Banerjee (who had been a member of the economics faculty of MIT since 1993), along with Sendhil Mullainathan (an economist then at MIT), founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research centre supporting scientifically informed policy-making to reduce global poverty. Duflo and Banerjee were married in 2015.
