Esther Duflo becomes youngest ever Nobel Economics Prize winner

The Nobel Prize winner for Economic sciences Esther Duflo is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences. The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer on Monday. The Nobel Prize was awarded to them for their or their experimental approach to reduce poverty globally. Esther is also the wife of Laureate Abhijit Banerjee. The first award winner was Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

About Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo, is a French American economist, Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate who serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and is Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research's development economics program.

Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behaviour, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael 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.

READ | Nobel Winner Yoshino's Li-ion Batteries Symbolise Japan's Ingenuity

Achievements 

Her PhD 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 trained development practitioners in running randomized controlled trials.

READ | Ethiopia PM Abiy Ahmed Ali: Know The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Of 2019

Their research is to help fight poverty

This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. The key to their research is to take the daunting issue and break it down into smaller questions which can be more credibly answered. Examples of these smaller questions include the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected.

The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved the world's 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.

READ | Nobel Economics Prize 2019: Abhijit Banerjee, Wife Duflo, & Kremer Win

READ | Nobel Awards Season Comes To An End With Economics Prize