India Gets Second Nobel Laureate in Economics

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo stand outside their home after learning that they have been named co-winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. They will share the prize with Michael Kremer of Harvard University Photo / courtesy MIT News

Indian American MIT Economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee Bags the Second Nobel Prize in Economics after Amartya Sen (1998)

BOSTON(TIP): India got another Nobel laureate in Economics after Amartya Sen when Indian American MIT economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was named the winner of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. His fellow MIT economist and wife Esther Duflo was named co-winner of the Nobel, along with another co-winner, Harvard University economist Michael Kremer. Duflo, 46, is the youngest economics laureate ever and the second woman to receive the prize in its half-century history.

Incidentally Amartya and Abhijit, both Bengalis, also share the same college, Presidency Kolkata. Banerjee is the sixth Indian with ‘Kolkata connection’ to win a Nobel after Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Ronald Ross, C V Raman, Mother Teresa and Amartya Sen.

In the statement announcing the awardees, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which grants the Nobel awards, noted that the work of Duflo, Banerjee, and Kremer has “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice” and cited their “new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty.”

The work of Duflo and Banerjee, which has long been intertwined with Kremer’s, has been highly innovative in the area of development economics, emphasizing the use of field experiments in research in order to realize the benefits of laboratory-style randomized, controlled trials and has helped transform antipoverty research and relief efforts.

Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.

Duflo and Banerjee also co-founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with a third co-founder, Sendhil Mullainathan, now of the University of Chicago. J-PAL, a global network of antipoverty researchers that conducts field experiments, has now become a major center of research, facilitating work across the world.

J-PAL also examines which kinds of local interventions have the greatest impact on social problems, and works to implement those programs more broadly, in cooperation with governments and NGOs. Among J-PAL’s notable interventions are deworming programs that have been adopted widely.

Duflo and Banerjee have published dozens of research papers, together and with other co-authors. They have also co-written two books together, “Poor Economics” (2011) and the forthcoming “Good Economics for Hard Times” (2019).

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