Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (born 21 February 1961) is an Indian-born naturalized American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies.

Banerjee spent three years at Presidency, receiving a BSc (Honors) in Economics in 1981.

He took classes with his father, Dipak Banerjee, in addition to Mihir Rakshit.

His favorite subject was economic history, taught by Nabhendu Sen.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Banerjee pursued an MA in Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, selecting to study there over the Delhi School of Economics because of its political life, and the latter's reputation as a stepping stone to PhD programs in the United States, which Banerjee had little interest in pursuing.

His teachers included Anjan Mukherjee and Krishna Bharadwaj, the latter of whom taught a course on the history of economic thought.

While studying at JNU, Banerjee was arrested, imprisoned, and beaten at Tihar Jail, in response to a protest in which students gheraoed the then vice chancellor of the university.

He completed his degree in 1983, and was encouraged by his parents and teachers to apply for PhD programs in economics.

Banerjee applied to Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, attending the first of these despite no students from Jawaharlal Nehru University having previously been admitted to the university.

At Harvard, his classmates included Tyler Cowen, Alan Krueger, Steven Kaplan, and Nouriel Roubini.

He attended courses with Andreu Mas-Colell, Lawrence Summers, Kala Krishna, Oliver Hart, and Susan Collins, and briefly served as a research assistant to Jeffrey Sachs.

His dissertation research, supervised by Eric Maskin, was primarily theoretical, and examined the economics of information.

Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.

He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

His work focuses on development economics.

Together with Esther Duflo he has discussed field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.

In 1994, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship, awarded annually to early career researchers with the "potential to revolutionize their fields."

According to Research Papers in Economics, Banerjee is among the most productive development economists in the world, ranking in the top 75 researchers by total research output.

Banerjee was born to a Ghoti Brahmin family in Mumbai.

His father, Dipak Banerjee, was a professor of economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and received his PhD from the London School of Economics under the supervision of Richard Lipsey.

His mother, Nirmala (née Patankar) Banerjee was a professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

Banerjee attended secondary school at South Point School in Kolkata, where he was described as a "brilliant" but "very quiet" student.

During high school, he was interested in literature, history, philosophy, and mathematics, choosing to pursue his undergraduate studies in the latter at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

He dropped out of the program after one week, transferring to Presidency College, then an affiliate of the University of Calcutta, to study economics.

He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

In 2009, he received the Infosys Prize in the social sciences (economics) category.

In 2012, he shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book Poor Economics.

In 2013, he was named by the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 (their expiration date).

In 2014, he received the Bernhard-Harms-Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

He served on the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2018.

In 2019, Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

He and Esther Duflo are married, and became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel or Nobel Memorial Prize.

In addition to his academic appointments, Banerjee is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2019, he delivered Export-Import Bank of India's 34th Commencement Day Annual Lecture on Redesigning Social Policy.

In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, together with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Banerjee and his co-workers try to measure the effectiveness of actions (such as government programmes) in improving people's lives.

For this, they use randomized controlled trials, similar to clinical trials in medical research.

For example, although polio vaccination is freely available in India, many mothers were not bringing their children for the vaccination drives.

Banerjee and Prof. Esther Duflo, also from MIT, tried an experiment in Rajasthan, where they gave a bag of pulses to mothers who vaccinated their children.