In addition to her academic appointment, Duflo is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL),[2] an MIT-based research center promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation.[4] As of 2020, more than 400 million people had been impacted by programs tested by J-PAL affiliated researchers.[5] Since 2024, Duflo has also served as the president of the Paris School of Economics alongside her appointment at MIT.[6]
Duflo was born on October 25, 1972 to Violaine and Michel Duflo at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris, France.[14] Her father was a mathematics professor, and her mother was a pediatrician.[14] During Duflo's childhood, her mother often traveled, volunteering for a humanitarian NGO providing support to childhood victims of war.[14][4] Duflo was raised and attended schools until grade 11 in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris.[14] Duflo completed her secondary schooling in 1990 at the Lycée Henri-IV, a magnet school in central Paris.[14]
After secondary school, Duflo pursued an undergraduate degree at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she specialized in history and economics.[14][4] She intended to study history prior to beginning her degree, but was recruited to study economics by Daniel Cohen.[14] From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a French teaching assistant in Moscow, where she wrote her history master's dissertation.[14] In Moscow, she worked as a research assistant at the Central Bank of Russia, and as an assistant to Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist selected to advise the Russian Ministry of Finance in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.[14][4] The experience led her to conclude that "economics had potential as a lever of action in the world" and she could satisfy academic ambitions while doing "things that mattered".[4]
Duflo completed her PhD in 1999,[2][9] under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.[14] Her dissertation research leveraged a natural experiment —a large-scale school expansion program in Indonesia — to study the effects of education on future earnings, providing the first causal evidence that increased schooling improves earnings later in life.[4][15]
Career
After completing her PhD in 1999, Duflo became an Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, her alma mater. Economics professors are rarely hired from the PhD students in their own departments; however, following the departure of Michael Kremer for Harvard University, the department made an exception to strength MIT's development economics group.[14] From 2001 to 2002, Duflo took leave from MIT to pursue a visiting academic position at Princeton University. Upon her return, she was promoted to Associate Professor and became among the youngest faculty members in the department's history to be offered tenure.
Duflo has also held several advisory appointments in government. As of 2024, she was a member of the economic advisory committee of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. From 2012 to 2017, she served on the Global Development Council of President Barack Obama, led by economist Mohamed El-Erian.
Research
Duflo's research focuses on a range of topics in the microeconomics of development, such as health, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and household behavior. Much of her research leverages randomized controlled trials to evaluate the causal effects of social interventions on development outcomes of interest.
Education
Duflo's dissertation research examined the labor market returns to education through analysis of a unique policy experiment: a mass school construction program in Indonesia.[4] Published in the American Economic Review, the study showed that children exposed to the program (i.e. who were aged 2 to 6 in 1974) received between 0.12 and 0.19 more years of education[15] and had higher wages in adulthood.[4] The paper provided some of the first causal evidence in a developing country context that increased education does lead to increased wages.[4]
Among Duflo's most recognized work leverages randomized impact evaluations to study interventions aimed at improving educational outcomes in the developing world.[17] In 2007, Duflo — alongside co-authors Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Leigh Linden — published a study in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics evaluating a remedial education program aimed at improving learning outcomes of those "left behind" in Indian schools.[17] They found that the program substantially improved learning outcomes, in contrast to other interventions such as providing textbooks.[17][18] Their research has encouraged the proliferation of "Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL)", an educational program aimed at improving learning outcomes by providing targeted instruction to primary school pupils behind on mathematics and reading.[19]
Gender
In other early work, Duflo examines the role of gender in the intra-household allocation of resources by leveraging another unique policy shock: a large increase in the value of old-age pensions in South Africa in 1991.[10] Duflo shows that in households containing elderly females ("grandmothers"), the increase in pension was associated with an increase in the body mass index of young girls ("granddaughters").[10] In contrast, she documents no such effect if the only pension recipient is an elderly man ("grandfather").[10] This result suggests that girls may benefit when a larger proportion of household resources are controlled by older female family members.[20]
Microfinance
Among Duflo's most cited work leverages a randomized impact evaluation to test the effects of microfinance on household consumption and well-being.[4] The research was a direct response to the popularity of microfinance as a tool to eliminate global poverty, and Duflo's perception that microcredit was being celebrated as a development intervention despite no systematic evidence on its efficacy.[4] Alongside Cynthia Kinnan, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, Duflo partnered with a microcredit firm in Hyderabad, India to conduct a randomized controlled trial on the effects of expanding access to microfinance on development outcomes of interest.[4] She found that microfinance may allow some individuals to start businesses or acquire assets, but found little evidence that microfinance caused an increase in overall consumption.[4] The results were received negatively in the microfinance industry,[4] and inspired several follow-on studies of the effects of microfinance in other geographic contexts.[21][22] In 2019, Rachael Meager — a former PhD student of Duflo — published a meta-analysis of the literature in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, finding little evidence to suggest that microfinance raises consumption or encourages household small business creation.[23]
Personal life
Duflo is married to MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee; the couple have two children.[24][25] Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.[26]
Selected works
Books
In April 2011, Duflo released her book Poor Economics, co-authored with Banerjee. It documents their 15 years of experience in conducting randomized control trials to alleviate poverty.[27] The book has received critical acclaim. Nobel laureateAmartya Sen called it "a marvelously insightful book by the two outstanding researchers on the real nature of poverty."[28][29]
Duflo has published numerous papers, receiving 6,200 citations in 2017. Most of them have appeared in the top five economic journals.[30]
Awards
Nobel prize in Economic Sciences
Esther Duflo was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2019 along with her two co-researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Duflo is the youngest person (at age 46) and the second woman to win this award (after Elinor Ostrom in 2009).[31][32][33]
Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover, in the Indian context Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of Vadodara fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions.[35]
In response to such findings, Banerjee, Duflo and co-authors argued that efforts to get more children into school must be complemented by reforms to improve school quality.[35]
Responding by telephone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Duflo explained that she received the prize "at an extremely opportune and important time" and hoped that it would "inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve, like every single human being."[36] She also revealed that she wanted to use the award as a "megaphone" in her fighting efforts to tackle poverty and to improve children's education.[37]
French President Emmanuel Macron offered his congratulations: "Esther Duflo's magnificent Nobel Prize is a reminder that French economists are currently among the best in the world and shows that research in that field can have concrete impact on human welfare."[38]
Much of the discussion related to the prize shared by Duflo and her co-laureates focused on their influential use of randomized controlled trials in designing their experiments.[17] Summarizing the research approach which she had utilized along with Banerjee and Kremer, Duflo said simply, "Our goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence."[39]
Duflo came under criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist party currently in power in India, due to the party's displeasure over her husband Abhijit Banerjee achieving the Nobel Prize. Many within the party derogatorily commented that Banerjee had been preferred by the Nobel committee over other Hindu academicians, due to him marrying a white European woman (viz Duflo), which was in violation of the Hindu preference for endogamy.[40]
In 2008, The Economist listed Duflo as one of the top eight young economists in the world.[43]
In May 2008, the American magazine Foreign Policy named her as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world.[44]
In 2009, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a "genius" grant.[45] She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009.[46] On 21 May 2009, she was selected as the first recipient of the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which she finally received on 4 June 2010. The prize is awarded every two years to a top young researcher in economics or the social sciences for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.[47]
She is a recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal for economists under 40 who have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.[48] In the autumn of 2010, she was named to Fortune magazine's 40 Under 40 list.[49] She received her (first) honorary doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain, on 2 February 2010.[50]
In 2010, Foreign Policy again named her to its list of top 100 global thinkers.[51]
In 2015, she received the A.SK Social Sciences Award from the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, one of the world's largest awards in the social sciences, which is endowed with US$200,000.[59]
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