Published 16:33 IST, October 14th 2019
Couple Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo share Nobel Economics Prize
Abhijit Banerjee, an Indian-American economist share the Nobel prize in Economics with his spouse Esther Duflo for their extraordinary work to eradicate poverty
The last Nobel prize was announced, with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for their extraordinary work to eradicate global poverty. Abhijit Banerjee, the Indian-American economist happens to share the Nobel prize with his spouse Esther Duflo. The Nobel Prize for Economics is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences which is awarded in memory of Alfred Nobel. The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 14.
Abhijit Banerjee shares the honour with his wife
The winners Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo, are both economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, Michael Kremer who will also share the Nobel Prize for Economics with the couple is an economist at Harvard University. While Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, Esther Duflo is the Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT.
Nobel Prize winners worked on microeconomic issues to eradicate poverty
All the three winners have worked together on the microeconomic issues that majorly focus on the developing countries. Their experiments were focused on alleviating poverty from the world. Esther Duflo is the second and youngest woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in the field of Economic Sciences. She along with her spouse Abhijit Banerjee has done extensive work on how global poverty is impacted by household behaviour, the importance of education, access to monetary stability, health care and policymaking. While talking to the global media, Duflo said that she felt incredible and that all three of them have worked together on more than a hundred researches that will help eradicate global poverty.
They simplified the complicated questions on poverty
The Nobel committee awarded the researchers the prestigious award for their work on poverty. The researchers were able to simplify complicated questions about poverty into smaller research questions, such as what are the best interventions that can help improve child health, further using the approach of experimentation to solve those questions. The researchers made a breakthrough in the field of economics by solving the problem of poverty with an experimental problem-solving approach.
Updated 18:42 IST, October 14th 2019