On Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer had won the 2019 Nobel Prize for economics "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". The research conducted by them has considerably improved the 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, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Here are some interesting facts about the Indian-origin Abhijit Banerjee.
MIT, in a release, said the 'work of Duflo and Banerjee has emphasised the use of field experiments in research, to bring the principles of laboratory-style randomised, controlled trials to empirical economics'.
Amartya Sen was the other Presidency alumni to win the Economics Nobel. Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize along with two others - his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer on Monday "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For Duflo and Banerjee, an important part of their work has been ensuring that the agency of the "beneficiaries" -- usually, in developing countries like India, poorer individuals -- is put at the centre of any policy design. This is a crucial way in which experimental results are often better than large scale data-based inference, says Mihir S Sharma.
