7 Things To Know About Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee
Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics along with two others. He will share the award with his wife Esther Duflo and Harvard professor Michael Kremer for their work which has "dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice." Here are 7 things to know about Abhijit Banerjee:
- Indian-origin Abhijit Banerjee is one of the leading development economists. He is presently working as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
- Banerjee graduated in science from the Calcutta University in 1981 before moving to the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi from where he completed his MA in 1983. He received his PhD from the Harvard University in 1988.
- In 2003, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab's directors.
- Banerjee is a past President of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the NBER and 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 and a winner of the Infosys prize.
- He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including "Poor Economics", which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award in 2011.
- He is the editor of three more books and has also directed two documentary films. He also served on the UN Secretary-General's high-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 Development Agenda.
- In 2011, Banerjee was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory.
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