Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo, born in Paris in 1972, is a French-American economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, which brought randomized controlled trials from medicine into development economics as a way of testing which anti-poverty programs actually work. She co-founded and co-directs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, a research center whose evaluated programs have reached more than 400 million people. Her research covers education, gender, financial inclusion, political economy and health in developing countries.