Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, a naturalised American economist born in India, is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. “For their experimental approach to relieving global poverty,” Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. He and his wife, Esther Duflo, are the sixth married couple to share the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences.
In 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, together with his two co-researchers Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for their experimental approach to easing worldwide poverty.”
“Their experimental research approaches now totally dominate development economics,” according to a news statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is co-founded by Banerjee (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan). He is a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty and a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action. Banerjee was the president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an international research fellow at the Kiel Institute, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow, and an Econometric Society fellow. He has also received Guggenheim Fellowships and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships.
Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and he has formerly taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.
His research focuses on the economics of development. He has explored field experiments as a key tool for determining causal linkages in economics alongside Esther Duflo. In 2004, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also awarded the Infosys Prize 2009 for economics in the social sciences category. He also won the first Infosys Prize in the category of social sciences (economics).
