Who is Abhijit Banerjee? Indian-American who won Nobel Prize in economics

Stockholm, Oct 14: Abhijit Banerjee, Indian-origin economist along with his wife Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Prize fighting poverty.

The 58-year-old economist received the prestigiuos award for "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty."

"The research conducted by the 2019 Economic Sciences 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 statement released by the Academy.

The 'Poor Economics' has been translated into more than 17 languages.

"Why would a man in Morocco who doesn't have enough to eat buy a television? Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn, even when they attend school? Does having lots of children actually make you poorer? Answering questions like these is critical if we want to have a chance to really make a dent against global poverty," Banerjee wrote in the book 'Poor Economics'. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films.

Born in 1961 in Mumbai, Banerjee is currently professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. The subject of his doctoral thesis was "Essays in Information Economics."

In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab.

In 2009 JPAL won the BBVA Foundation "Frontier of Knowledge" award in the development cooperation category.

Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory.

He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com) which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year.

He also served on the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the website said. Duflo, born 1972 in Paris, received her PhD in 1999 from MIT.