The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded jointly to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize.
They were awarded for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.
Duflo is married to Banerjee and in 2011 wrote the immensely popular book “Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & The Ways to End it together”.
The couple are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michael Kremer is at Harvard University.
Duflo is only the second woman, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009, to win the economics Nobel.
The “new, powerful tool” employed by the Laureates is the use of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs).
RCTs were largely used in medicine to test the effects of drugs.
Tamilnadu Connection – Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action lab (J-Pal)
Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo have been working with the Tamil Nadu government for the last five years on improving governance.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal) was founded by the couple in Tamilnadu.
J-Pal assists the government in building internal capacity to evaluate and monitor ongoing or new schemes and to adopt a result/outcome-based approach.
About Abhijith Banerjee
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (born 1961) is an Indian-born American economist.
In 1981, he completed BSc in Economics at Presidency College, University of Calcutta and later M.A. in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1983.
He earned a Ph. D in Economics at Harvard by doing a Doctoral thesis on "Essays in Information Economics."
Together with Esther Duflo and Tamilnadu born American economist Sendhil Mullainadhan he founded the J-PAL in 2003.