Speaker

Esther DUFLO

Professor - MIT

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance.

Professor Esther Duflo’s first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. She subsequently received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1999.

Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences (2015), Infosys Prize (2014), the David N. Kershaw Award (2011), a John Bates Clark Medal (2010), and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship (2009).  With Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into 17 languages.

Duflo is a member of the President’s Global Development Council and she is a Founding Editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

Publications :

Book :

• Poor Economics : A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), Public Affairs. Published in 17+ languages

Journals  (most recent):

• “A multifaceted program causes lasting progress for the very poor: Evidence from six countries” (with Abhijit Banerjee, Nathanael Goldberg, Dean Karlan, Robert Osei, William Parienté, Jeremy Shapiro, Bram Thuysbaert, and Christopher Udry) , Science Magazine, Vol. 348, No. 6236, May 2015.
• “Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves” (with Rema Hanna and Michael Greenstone), forthcoming American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, (see NBER working paper No.18033, BREAD working paper 338)
• “Education, HIV and Early Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Kenya” (with Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer), forthcoming, Annual Review of Economics. (See NBER Working Paper No. 20784, CEPR Discussion Paper 8680, BREAD Working Paper).
• “School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools” (with Pascaline Dupas and Michael Kremer), forthcoming, Journal of Public Economics. (see also NBER working paper No. 17939, BREAD working paper 330)

Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/JPAL_Global