Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is a Nobel Prize winner and the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He shares the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics with his wife, Esther Duflo, and colleague Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. He is a founding director of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab(J-PAL), a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.

Banerjee is the author of many articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. His latest book, co-authored with Esther Duflo, titled Good Economics for Hard Times, explores how economics can help us solve social and political problems of our day. He is the editor of three other books and has directed two documentary films. He also served on the U.N.Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on thePost-2015 Development Agenda.

Among Banerjee’s achievements and honors are the inaugural Infosys Prize in Social Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers, he holds research fellowships and similar positions at NBER, CEPR, the Kiel Institute, the American Academy of Arts andSciences, and the Econometric Society. He is a trustee of Save the Children USA and Chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel. He is also the former president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development and was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD.