Esther Duflo, FBA (French: [dyflo]; born 25 October 1972) is a French-American economist[1] currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
[2] In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
[3] In addition to her academic appointment, Duflo is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL),[2] an MIT-based research center promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation.
Alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, Duflo secured additional funding as part of her retention offer to found a laboratory aimed at promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation.
The Poverty Action Lab was initially led by Rachel Glennerster, a British economist and the wife of Michael Kremer, co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
[16] In line with Duflo and Banerjee's experience in the Indian context, J-PAL's first regional office was founded in 2007 in Chennai at the Institute for Financial Management and Research.
Duflo's research focuses on a range of topics in the microeconomics of development, such as health, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and household behavior.
Duflo's dissertation research examined the labor market returns to education through analysis of a unique policy experiment: a mass school construction program in Indonesia.
[4] Published in the American Economic Review, the study showed that children exposed to the program (i.e. who were aged 2 to 6 in 1974) received between 0.12 and 0.19 more years of education[15] and had higher wages in adulthood.
[17] In 2007, Duflo — alongside co-authors Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Leigh Linden — published a study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics evaluating a remedial education program aimed at improving learning outcomes of those "left behind" in Indian schools.
[17][18] Their research has encouraged the proliferation of "Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL)", an educational program aimed at improving learning outcomes by providing targeted instruction to primary school pupils behind on mathematics and reading.
[19] In other early work, Duflo examines the role of gender in the intra-household allocation of resources by leveraging another unique policy shock: a large increase in the value of old-age pensions in South Africa in 1991.
[4] The research was a direct response to the popularity of microfinance as a tool to eliminate global poverty, and Duflo's perception that microcredit was being celebrated as a development intervention despite no systematic evidence on its efficacy.
[4] Alongside Cynthia Kinnan, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, Duflo partnered with a microcredit firm in Hyderabad, India to conduct a randomized controlled trial on the effects of expanding access to microfinance on development outcomes of interest.
"[28][29] In 2019, she co-authored with Banerjee their latest book, "Good Economics for Hard Times," where she discusses possible solutions to a series of current issues such as inequality, climate change, and globalization.
[31] Esther Duflo was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2019 along with her two co-researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
[36]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.