"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our 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. They have laid the foundations of the best way to design measures that reduce global poverty"[3][8]
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.[19][20] 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."[19] 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. Subsequently, she obtained a PhD degree in economics at MIT in 1999, under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist. 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.[19] Upon completing her doctorate, she was appointed assistant professor of economics at MIT and 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.[21]
Michael Robert Kremer was born in 1964 to Eugene and Sara Lillian (née Kimmel) Kremer in New York City.[22] He graduated from Harvard University (A.B. in Social Studies in 1985 and Ph.D. in economics in 1992).[23][24] A postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1992 to 1993, Kremer was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago in Spring 1993, and professor at MIT from 1993 to 1999. From 1999 to 2020, he was a professor at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago as a professor in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the college, and the Harris School of Public Policy on September 1, 2020.[23][25]