Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and her research seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor and to help design and evaluate social policies. She focuses on health, education, financial inclusion, environment, and governance.
J-PAL has conducted more than 200 empirical development experiments and trained development practitioners to run randomized controlled trials, and the resulting programs have reached more than 400 million people. The lab has branches in India and at the Paris School of Economics.
In 2019, she shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Duflo is the youngest person, and only the second woman, to receive the Nobel Prize for Economics.
Duflo, who hails from Paris, earned degrees in history and economics from École Normale Supérieure. She spent time in Moscow working as a Research Assistant for a French economist connected to the Central Bank of Russia and, separately, with the American economist Jeffrey Sachs.
She then went on to earn a master’s in economics from DELTA, an association of French economic research facilities that later merged with other institutes to form the Paris School of Economics. She then earned her doctor of philosophy in economics from MIT in 1999 and accepted the position of Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor at age 29, making her the youngest tenured faculty member.
Duflo was the Founding Editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Editor of The American Economic Review, and a Co-Editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics. In 2011, she released her book “Poor Economics,” co-authored with Banerjee.
In addition to the Nobel prize, Duflo has received the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, the A.SK Social Science Award, Infosys Prize, the David N. Kershaw Award, a John Bates Clark Medal, and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship.