Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. 58-year-old Abhijit was educated at the University of Calcutta, JNU and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) . The Nobel Prize committee in a statement said the research conducted by this year’s laureates has considerably improved the 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. In 2003, Abhijit Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab’s directors.
