Esther Duflo

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Esther Duflo is a French-American economist and Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for pioneering the use of randomized controlled trials to evaluate development interventions and transform development economics into a rigorous empirical science. Duflo became the second woman and the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences at the time of her award. As co-founder of J-PAL, she has orchestrated a global research enterprise that rigorously tests and scales interventions addressing global poverty across health, education, agriculture, finance, and governance. Her research has generated transformative findings: demonstrating that free insecticide-treated bed nets dramatically increase malaria prevention uptake compared to subsidized nets; showing that teacher incentive programs improve learning outcomes in some contexts but not others; and revealing that microfinance has more modest welfare effects than previously claimed. Duflo's methodological contributions include developing tools for analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects and for understanding the mechanisms behind policy effects, not just their existence. Beyond research, she has served on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Post-2015 Development, advising on the Sustainable Development Goals agenda. She has received the John Bates Clark Medal, the Infosys Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Award.