Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo (b. 1972, Paris) is a French-American economist and professor whose research on global poverty has shaped the field of development economics. She studied history and economics at the École normale supérieure in Paris and received her doctorate from MIT, where she is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. She co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT in 2003, with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan.

Her research uses randomized controlled trials — the methodology of clinical medicine applied to economic policy — to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions targeting poverty, education, and health in the developing world. This approach, which she has described as taking a rigorous, evidence-based attitude toward the question of what actually reduces poverty, produced findings that challenged long-standing assumptions in international development policy. With Abhijit Banerjee she co-authored Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (PublicAffairs, 2011) and Good Economics for Hard Times (PublicAffairs, 2019).

In 2019, Duflo, Banerjee, and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty — making Duflo the second woman and the youngest laureate ever to receive this prize. She has also served as an advisor to institutions including the United Nations and the World Bank.