Esther Duflo

Her doctoral dissertation focused on effects of a natural experiment involving an Indonesian school-expansion program, in the 1970s, and it provided conclusive evidence that in a developing country, more education resulted in higher wages.

Upon completing her doctorate, she was appointed assistant professor of economics at MIT.

Esther Duflo Banerjee, FBA (born 25 October 1972) is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris, the daughter of pediatrician Violaine Duflo and mathematics professor Michel Duflo.

During Duflo's childhood, her mother often participated in medical humanitarian projects.

After studying in the B/L program of Lycée Henri-IV's Classes préparatoires, Duflo began her undergraduate studies at École normale supérieure in Paris, planning to study history, her interest since childhood.

In her second year, she began considering a career in the civil service or politics.

She spent ten months in Moscow starting in 1993.

She taught French and worked on a history thesis that described how the Soviet Union "had used the big construction sites, like the Stalingrad tractor factory, for propaganda, and how propaganda requirements changed the actual shape of the projects."

In Moscow, she also worked as a research assistant for a French economist connected to the Central Bank of Russia and, separately, for Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist who was advising the Russian Minister of Finance.

The experiences at these research posts 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".

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, jointly with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) of the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and the École Normale Supérieure, in 1995.

Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have taken a special interest in India since 1997.

Subsequently, she obtained a PhD degree in economics at MIT in 1999, under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.

After earning her PhD in 1999, Duflo became an assistant professor at MIT.

She has been at MIT ever since, aside from a leave at Princeton University in 2001–2002, and at the Paris School of Economics in 2007 and 2017.

She was promoted to associate professor (with tenure) in 2002, at 29, making her among the youngest faculty members to be awarded tenure, and to full professor in 2003.

She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), founded in 2003 and supported by Community Jameel; holds the Poverty and Public Policy chair at the Collège de France since 2022; and is president of the Paris School of Economics since 2024.

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.

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.

The lab has branches in Chennai, India and at the Paris School of Economics.

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.

Focused on assessing developments addressing social welfare, in 2008, she received the Frontier of Knowledge award for development cooperation.

She was the main speaker at the first Bocconi Lecture of Bocconi University in 2010, followed in 2011 by Caroline Hoxby.

Together with Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, 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.

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.

Duflo is an NBER research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program, where she serves as both a board member and a director.

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.

She writes a monthly column for Libération, a French daily newspaper.

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

Duflo is a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program.

Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation.

Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.

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.

Since August 2023, she holds a weekly chronicle on French radio station France Inter, "Le biais d'Esther Duflo".