Esther Duflo Biography| Esther Duflo| Who is Esther Duflo?
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French American economist, who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Duflo is an NBER research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s development economics program.
Duflo shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. She is the youngest person and the second woman to win this award.
Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan,
she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. She has co-authored a book with Abhijit Banerjee called “Good Economics for Hard Times” Juggernaut Books, which will be out in October 2019.
Esther Duflo Age | How Old is Esther Duflo?
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French economist, who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. She was born on October 25, 1972 (age 46 years old as 2019), Paris, France
Early life
Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris. Her father Michel Duflo was a mathematics professor and her mother was a doctor. During her childhood, her mother often participated in medical humanitarian projects.
Esther Duflo Education
After studying in Lycée Henri-IV’s Classes préparatoires “B/L”, Duflo entered her undergraduate studies at École normale supérieure in Paris planning to study history. In her second year, she began considering a career in the civil service or politics.
She spent ten months in Moscow starting in 1993. She taught French and worked on a history thesis that told how the Soviet Union “had used the big construction sites, like the Stalingrad tractor factory, for propaganda, and how propaganda requirements changed the actual shape of the projects.”
In Moscow, she also worked as a research assistant for a French economist then connected to the Bank of Russia and, separately, for Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist at Harvard advising the Minister of Finance.
The research posts helped her to conclude that “economics had potential as a lever of action in the world” and she could satisfy academic ambitions while doing “things that mattered”.
She finished her degree in history and economics at École Normale Supérieure in 1994, and she received a master’s degree from DELTA, now the Paris School of Economics, jointly with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences of the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres and the École Normale Supérieure in 1995.
Subsequently, she completed a Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1999, under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist. Upon completing her Ph.D., she was appointed an assistant professor of economics at MIT and has been at MIT ever since, aside from being on leave to Princeton University in 2001–2002.
She was promoted to associate professor (with tenure) in 2002, at 29, making her among the youngest faculty member to be awarded tenure.
Nobel prize in Economic Sciences
Esther Duflo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 along with her two co-researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted: “Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.”
The Nobel committee commented:
“Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover,
in the Indian context, Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of Vadodara, fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions.
“In response to such findings, Banerjee, Duflo and co-authors argued that efforts to get more children into school must be complemented by reforms to improve school quality.”
Responding by telephone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Duflo explained that she received the prize “at an extremely opportune and important time” and hoped that it would “inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve like every single human being.”
Other awards
She won the 2014 Infosys Prize in Social Science-Economics for leading “a major shift in development economics”.
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. She received her (first) honorary doctorate from the Université Catholique de Louvain, on 2 February 2010.
In 2009 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a “genius” grant. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2009.
On 21 May 2009, she was selected as the first recipient of the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which she finally received on 4 June 2010. That is awarded every two years to a top young researcher in economics or the social sciences for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.
The US magazine Foreign Policy named her as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.[28] In 2010, Foreign Policy again named her to its list of top 100 global thinkers. The Economist lists Duflo as one of the top 8 young economists in the world. She was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in April 2011.
In 2005, Le Monde, Cercle des économistes awarded her the Best Young French Economist prize. She was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize by the American Economic Association in 2002, which honors a female economist under 40 who has made outstanding contributions in any field of economic research.
In 2012, Duflo was picked by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers. She shared the 2012 Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book for Poor Economics with co-author Abhijit Banerjee.
She received the 2015 Princess of Asturias Social Sciences award in Spain.
Esther Duflo Children, Sister, Ted talk
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French American economist, who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pieces of information about her children is not yet revealed but stay ready for the update soon
Other professional activities
She was the founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and is a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics. Also, she is a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Economics and a member of the Human Capital Research Programme within the International Growth Centre.
She is currently a co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and she writes a monthly column for Libération, a French daily.
She was the main speaker at the first Bocconi Lecture of Bocconi University in 2010, followed in 2011 by Caroline Hoxby.
Esther Duflo Husband(Abhijit Banerjee) | Who is Esther DufloMarried to?
Esther married MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee in 2015. They have a child, born in 2012. Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Esther’s Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1999.
Who is Abhijit Banerjee?
Abhijit Binayak Banerjee (Bengali: অভিজিৎ বিনায়ক বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়; born 1961) is an eminent Indian American economist. Banerjee shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”
He is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He along with wife Esther Duflo is the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize.
Banerjee is a co-founder of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan). He is a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action and a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty.
Banerjee was a president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Econometric Society.
He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the co-author of Poor Economics. Lastly, he also serves on the academic advisory board of Plaksha University, an upcoming science, and technology university in India. His new book, co-authored with Esther Duflo, “Good Economics in Hard Times” (Juggernaut Books), will be out in October 2019.
Major contributions
Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on the effects of a natural experiment from data of an Indonesian school-expansion program of the 1970s to provide the first conclusive evidence that in a developing country, more education resulted in higher wages.
In 2003, she co-founded the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which has since conducted over 200 empirical development experiments and train development practitioners in running randomized controlled trials.