Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their approach to alleviate global poverty.
Fifty-eight-year-old Banerjee was born in 1961. He studied in Calcutta University’s Presidency College and Jawaharlal Nehru University and then did a PhD from Harvard in 1988.
Duflo, 46, is the second woman to win the economics prize after Elinor Ostrom got it in 2009, and is also the youngest ever to receive the economics award. She is married to Abhijit Banerjee.
“The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research,” said the Nobel committee in a statement.
Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. J-PAL is a global research centre based in Massachusetts.
Banerjee is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and winner of the Infosys prize. His articles on economics often appear in major news publications across the article. He was a former columnist of Hindustan Times.
Banerjee is the author of four books that includes Poor Economics, for which he won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011. The book has been translated into more than 17 languages.
Wishes started pouring in with the news of Banerjee winning the Nobel prize in economics.
Both Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Kremer is at Harvard University. Duflo is also the Editor of the American Economic Review, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Kremer, 54, is a development economist, who is currently the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that due to the studies of Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools.
The Nobel prize in economics prize includes 9 million-kronor (USD 918,000) cash, a gold medal and a diploma. The winners will equally share the prize money.
