Abhijit Banerjee: From JNU To Nobel In Economics, Who Is Indian-American MIT Professor?

Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

"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," said the Nobel committee in a statement.

Who is Abhijit Banerjee?

• Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988.
• He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his profile on the MIT website.
• In 2003, Banerjee founded the ‘Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’ (J-PAL), along with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab's directors.
• He also served on the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
• Banerjee was a president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Econometric Society.
• He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.
• He is the co-author of Poor Economics.
• Abhijit Banerjee was married to Arundhati Tuli Banerjee, a lecturer of literature at MIT. Later, Abhijit and Arundhati divorced.
• Their son, Kabir Banerjee who was born on February 20, 1991, died in 2016.

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• Abhijit has a child with co-researcher and MIT professor Esther Duflo. The child was born in 2012.
• Abhijit was a joint supervisor of Esther's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.
• Abhijit formally married Esther formally in 2015.