Esther Duflo
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]
Esther Duflo
2
- MIT (PhD 1999)
- École des hautes études en sciences sociales (DEA 1995)
- École normale supérieure
(Maîtrise 1994)
- Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2019)
- Infosys Prize (2014)
- John von Neumann Award (2013)
- John Bates Clark Medal (2010)
- Prix du meilleur jeune économiste de France (2005)
- Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2002)
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.[4] As of 2020, more than 400 million people had been impacted by programs tested by J-PAL affiliated researchers.[5] Since 2024, Duflo has also served as the president of the Paris School of Economics alongside her appointment at MIT.[6]
Duflo is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER),[7] a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),[8] and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.[7] Her research focuses on the microeconomics of development and spans topics such as household behavior,[9] education,[9][10] financial inclusion,[4] political economy,[10] gender,[10] and health.[11] Prior to receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Duflo was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2002)[9] and John Bates Clark Medal (2010)[10] by the American Economic Association.
Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Duflo is the co-author of Poor Economics[11] and Good Economics for Hard Times,[12] published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.[13]
Early life and education[edit]
Duflo was born on October 25, 1972 to Violaine and Michel Duflo at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris, France.[14] Her father was a mathematics professor, and her mother was a pediatrician.[14] During Duflo's childhood, her mother often traveled, volunteering for a humanitarian NGO providing support to childhood victims of war.[14][4] Duflo was raised and attended schools until grade 11 in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris.[14] Duflo completed her secondary schooling in 1990 at the Lycée Henri-IV, a magnet school in central Paris.[14]
After secondary school, Duflo pursued an undergraduate degree at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she specialized in history and economics.[14][4] She intended to study history prior to beginning her degree, but was recruited to study economics by Daniel Cohen.[14] From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a French teaching assistant in Moscow, where she wrote her history master's dissertation.[14] In Moscow, she worked as a research assistant at the Central Bank of Russia, and as an assistant to Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist selected to advise the Russian Ministry of Finance in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.[14][4] The experience led her to conclude that "economics had potential as a lever of action in the world" and she could satisfy academic ambitions while doing "things that mattered".[4]
She finished her degree in history and economics at École Normale Supérieure in 1994 and received a master's degree from DELTA, now the Paris School of Economics, in 1995.[7][14] While in Moscow, Duflo met Thomas Piketty, who encouraged her to apply for graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1][14] She gained admission to MIT's PhD program in economics, and enrolled alongside her then-boyfriend, Emmanuel Saez, in 1995 after finishing her master's degree.[4] Duflo's first class in development economics was co-taught by Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, with whom she would later share the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.[14] Her classmates at the time include several prominent development economists, including Eliana La Ferrara, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Jishnu Das.[14]
Duflo completed her PhD in 1999,[2][9] under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.[14] Her dissertation research leveraged a natural experiment —a large-scale school expansion program in Indonesia — to study the effects of education on future earnings, providing the first causal evidence that increased schooling improves earnings later in life.[4][15]
Career[edit]
After completing her PhD in 1999, Duflo became an Assistant Professor at MIT following the departure of Michael Kremer for the Economics Department of Harvard University. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002 at the age of 29, becoming among the youngest faculty members in the department's history to be offered tenure. In 2003, she was promoted to full professor, receiving competing offers from Princeton and Yale in the same year.
Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have taken a special interest in India since 1997. In 2003, she conducted a trial experiment on teacher absenteeism in 120 schools run by a non-profit group. By encouraging the teachers to photograph themselves with their students each day, she was able to reduce their absenteeism.[16]
In 2003, she co-founded Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which has since conducted over 200 empirical development experiments and trained development practitioners to run randomized controlled trials.[17] The lab has branches in Chennai, India and at the Paris School of Economics.[18] In 2004, together with several colleagues, Duflo conducted another experiment in India. It showed that taped speeches by women were more readily accepted in villages that had experienced women leaders. Duflo became increasingly convinced that communities supporting women candidates could expect economic benefits, but she experienced difficulty in convincing her peers.[16] Focused on assessing developments addressing social welfare, in 2008, she received the Frontier of Knowledge award for development cooperation.[19][20] Duflo entered the public sphere in 2013, when she sat on the new Global Development Committee, which advised former US President Barack Obama on issues regarding development aid in poor countries.[21]
Duflo is an NBER research associate,[22] a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),[23] and director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program, where she serves as both a board member and a director.[24][20]
She 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. Also, she is a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Economics and a member of the Human Capital Research Programme within the International Growth Centre.[18]
She writes a monthly column for Libération, a French daily newspaper.[25]
She was the main speaker at the first Bocconi Lecture of Bocconi University in 2010,[26] followed in 2011 by Caroline Hoxby.
In 2020, it was announced that Duflo would become chair of the Fund for Innovation in Development, an organization hosted by the French Development Agency that provides grants to develop and scale interventions for poverty and inequality.[27]
Since August 2023, she holds a weekly chronicle on French radio station France Inter, "Le biais d'Esther Duflo".[28]
In January 2024, Duflo was unanimously elected president of the Paris School of Economics, succeeding the late Daniel Cohen who died in August 2023. The term of the presidency is five years.[29][30][31][32][33][34][35]
Personal life[edit]
Duflo is married to MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee; the couple have two children.[43][44] Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.[16]
Selected works[edit]
Books[edit]
In April 2011, Duflo released her book Poor Economics, co-authored with Banerjee. It documents their 15 years of experience in conducting randomized control trials to alleviate poverty.[45] The book has received critical acclaim. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen called it "a marvelously insightful book by the two outstanding researchers on the real nature of poverty."[46][47]
Awards[edit]
Nobel prize in Economic Sciences[edit]
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". Duflo is the youngest person (at age 46) and the second woman to win this award (after Elinor Ostrom in 2009).[48][49][50]
The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted: "Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics."[51][52] The Nobel committee commented: