Abhijit Banerjee, in fullAbhijit Vinayak Banerjee, (born February 21, 1961, Mumbai, India), Indian-born American economist who, with Esther Duflo 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. Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer, often working with each other, focused on relatively small and specific problems that contributed to poverty and identified the 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, where their approach and methods became standard.
Banerjee studied economics at the University of Calcutta (B.Sc. 1981), Jawaharlal Nehru University (M.A. 1983), and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1988). He taught economics at Princeton University from 1988 to 1992, at Harvard in 1991 and 1992–93, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1993. At MIT, he was eventually (2003) appointed Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. In 2003 he and Duflo, along with Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at MIT, founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research centre supporting scientifically informed policy-making to reduce global poverty. Banerjee and Duflo were married in 2015.
