Esther Duflo is a French development economist, currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also a founder and director of MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a network of 45 affiliated professors around the world who use Randomized Evaluations to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation.
In 2019, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics with her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, becoming the second woman to receive this award and the youngest person in history.
Esther’s research centers around the issues of household behavior, education, access to finance, health and policy evaluation. She has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.
She has received numerous academic honors and prizes including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship last year. In 2005, she was named “Best French Young Economist Prize” by Le Monde/Cercle des economists, and in 2003, the American Economic Association awarded her the Elaine Bennett Prize for Research, which is given to a woman economist under the age of forty who has made outstanding contributions in any field of economic research.
Also, she is a recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal for economists under 40 made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge and she received the 2015 Princess of Asturias Social Sciences Award.
Esther Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and is Director of the Center of Economic Policy Research’s development economics program. After being a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics, she currently serves as the founding editor of the AEJ: Applied Economics.
