Kolkata-born economist Abhijit wins Nobel for Economics
Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their approach to alleviate global poverty.
Fifty-eight-year-old Banerjee was born in Kolkata in 1961. He studied in Calcutta University’s Presidency College and Jawaharlal Nehru University and then did a PhD from Harvard in 1988.
Duflo, 46, is the second woman to win the economics prize after Elinor Ostrom got it in 2009, and is also the youngest ever to receive the economics award. She is married to Abhijit Banerjee.
“The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our 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 Nobel committee in a statement.
Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. J-PAL is a global research centre based in Massachusetts. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s high-level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda.
Both Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Kremer is at Harvard University.
Wishes started pouring in with the news of Banerjee winning the Nobel prize in economics.
