Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo
Born	Esther Duflo 25 10, 1972
Birthplace	Paris, France
Nationality	French, American
Occupation	Economist, academic
Title	Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics
Employer	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Randomized controlled trials in development economics, co-founder of J-PAL
Education	PhD in Economics (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Spouse(s)	Abhijit Banerjee
Children	2
Awards	Template:Ubl
Website	[http://www.povertyactionlab.com/ Official site]

Esther Duflo (born 25 October 1972) is a French-American economist who holds the position of Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," making her, at the age of 46, the youngest person ever to receive the economics Nobel and only the second woman to do so. Duflo is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research center based at MIT that has promoted the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the effectiveness of social programs and policy interventions across the developing world. As of 2020, programs tested by J-PAL-affiliated researchers had reached more than 400 million people. Her research focuses on the microeconomics of development, encompassing topics such as household behavior, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and health. Together with Banerjee, she co-authored Poor Economics (2011) and Good Economics for Hard Times (2019), both of which brought development economics to a broad public audience. Since 2024, Duflo has also served as president of the Paris School of Economics, and in October 2025, the University of Zurich announced that she and Banerjee would join the faculty of the UZH School of Business, Economics, and Informatics in July 2026.

Early Life

Esther Duflo was born on 25 October 1972 in Paris, France. She grew up in a Protestant family in Paris. Her mother was a pediatrician who was involved in medical humanitarian work, an engagement that Duflo has cited as an early influence on her interest in the problems of poverty and development in lower-income countries. Her father was a mathematics professor. From an early age, Duflo was exposed to conversations about inequality, access to healthcare, and the challenges facing communities in the developing world.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Duflo discussed why she became an economist, noting the intellectual appeal of combining rigorous empirical methods with questions of direct social relevance. She has spoken publicly about the influence of her upbringing in shaping her conviction that poverty is not an intractable problem but rather one amenable to evidence-based solutions. Her mother's involvement in providing medical care in developing countries gave Duflo an early awareness that the provision of basic services—schools, clinics, clean water—could have measurable effects on people's lives.

Duflo's early intellectual formation in Paris, where she attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, grounded her in the French tradition of combining history, philosophy, and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary background would later inform her distinctive approach to economic research, which emphasizes fieldwork, experimental design, and close engagement with the communities she studies.

Education

Duflo studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she received a broad education in the humanities and social sciences before focusing on economics. She subsequently pursued graduate studies in the United States, enrolling in the doctoral program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, she was advised by Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist, both of whom were influential figures in the application of empirical methods to economics. Her doctoral work at MIT focused on development economics, and she completed her PhD in economics from the institution. The pairing of Banerjee's expertise in development economics and Angrist's contributions to econometric methodology provided Duflo with a rigorous methodological foundation that would become the hallmark of her subsequent career. Her time at MIT as a graduate student marked the beginning of a long professional and personal partnership with Banerjee, with whom she would later collaborate on dozens of research projects, co-found J-PAL, co-author two books, and eventually share the Nobel Prize.

Career

Early Academic Career and Founding of J-PAL

After completing her PhD, Duflo joined the MIT economics faculty, where she rose rapidly through the academic ranks. Her early research focused on using randomized controlled trials—a methodology more commonly associated with medical research—to evaluate the effectiveness of development interventions in areas such as education, healthcare, and microcredit. This approach represented a significant methodological shift in development economics, which had historically relied more heavily on observational data, cross-country regressions, and theoretical modeling.

In 2003, Duflo co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT together with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan. Named after the father of Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, a Saudi businessman and MIT alumnus who provided the founding endowment, J-PAL became the institutional backbone of a global movement to apply experimental methods to questions of poverty alleviation. Under Duflo's co-directorship, J-PAL grew into a network of affiliated researchers conducting randomized evaluations across dozens of countries in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

The core premise behind J-PAL's work was that well-intentioned development programs often fail because they are not rigorously tested before being scaled up. By running randomized controlled trials—in which communities or individuals are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a particular intervention—researchers could isolate the causal effects of specific policies on outcomes such as school attendance, vaccination rates, savings behavior, or agricultural productivity. As of 2020, J-PAL reported that more than 400 million people had been reached by programs informed by its research.

Research Contributions

Duflo's research spans a wide range of topics within development economics, including education, health, financial inclusion, gender, political economy, and household behavior. A significant body of her work has examined the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve educational outcomes in developing countries. Her studies have investigated questions such as whether reducing class sizes improves learning, how the hiring of additional teachers affects student performance, and what role incentive structures play in teacher attendance and effort.

In the area of health economics, Duflo and her collaborators have conducted experiments evaluating strategies to increase immunization rates, improve access to clean water, and encourage the adoption of preventive health behaviors. Their work demonstrated that small nudges—such as providing lentils as an incentive for parents to bring children to immunization camps—could produce large increases in vaccination rates, challenging the assumption that low uptake was primarily driven by lack of information or cultural resistance.

Duflo's work on microfinance and financial inclusion has also been influential. Through a series of randomized evaluations, she and her co-authors examined the impacts of access to microcredit on household welfare, business investment, and consumption patterns. Their findings provided a more nuanced picture than the often celebratory narrative surrounding microfinance, showing that while access to credit could be beneficial, it was not a panacea for poverty reduction.

Her research on gender and political economy includes studies of the effects of political representation by women. In one notable line of research conducted in India, Duflo and her collaborators took advantage of a constitutional amendment requiring that one-third of village council leader positions be reserved for women. They found that female-led village councils invested differently from male-led councils, allocating more resources to public goods that women valued more highly, such as drinking water infrastructure.

Duflo has articulated a view that poverty constrains household choices in fundamental ways. As she has noted, when families live in poverty, they cannot afford essential services such as education and healthcare and must rely on state provisions to access these services. This perspective has informed much of her experimental work, which often focuses on how the design and delivery of public services can be optimized to better serve the poor.

Publications

Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Duflo co-authored Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, published in April 2011. The book drew on their extensive fieldwork and experimental research to challenge conventional wisdom about poverty and the effectiveness of aid. Rather than engaging in the broad "big push" versus "aid doesn't work" debate that had dominated development discourse, Banerjee and Duflo argued for a granular, evidence-based approach that examined specific interventions and their measurable effects on the lives of the poor. Poor Economics received critical acclaim and won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011.

Their second book, Good Economics for Hard Times, was published in November 2019, shortly after the Nobel Prize announcement. The book addressed a broader set of economic policy questions, including immigration, trade, inequality, and climate change, applying the same empirical sensibility to topics of pressing public concern. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses, reflecting the widespread adoption of her work in university teaching.

The Nobel Prize

On 14 October 2019, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Duflo, Banerjee, and Michael Kremer had been jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." The Nobel committee cited their work in transforming development economics into a more experimental and evidence-based field. At 46, Duflo became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics and only the second woman, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

In her Nobel lecture, Duflo discussed the potential and limitations of the experimental approach, emphasizing that while randomized controlled trials cannot answer every question in development economics, they provide a critical tool for building credible evidence about what works and what does not. She also spoke about the importance of using evidence to inform policy at scale, a theme central to J-PAL's mission.

Recent Roles and Appointments

In addition to her long-standing appointment at MIT, Duflo took on the presidency of the Paris School of Economics in 2024. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

In October 2025, the University of Zurich announced that Duflo and Banerjee would be joining the faculty of the UZH School of Business, Economics, and Informatics beginning in July 2026. Also in 2025, Duflo was announced as the Chair of the Jury for the inaugural cycle of the Lafayette Fellowship, a distinction organized through Villa Albertine that underscored her standing in international academic and cultural networks.

Duflo has also engaged in public discourse on the subject of education and careers. Speaking to students, she has cautioned against an excessive focus on acquiring narrowly defined skills, arguing that skills can become obsolete and that a broader intellectual formation may be more valuable in the long run.

Personal Life

Esther Duflo is married to Abhijit Banerjee, her long-time collaborator and fellow Nobel laureate. Banerjee served as her doctoral advisor at MIT, and their professional partnership evolved into a personal one over the course of their years of collaborative research. The couple has two children.

Duflo holds dual French and American citizenship. She and Banerjee reside in the United States, where both maintain their appointments at MIT, though their work regularly takes them to field research sites across the developing world, particularly in India and sub-Saharan Africa. In a 2025 interview with the Harvard Business Review, Duflo reflected on the interplay between her personal and professional life, including how she and Banerjee manage their parallel roles as co-researchers, co-authors, and spouses.

Recognition

Duflo has received numerous awards and honors over the course of her career. Prior to the Nobel Prize, she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2010 by the American Economic Association, given annually to an American economist under the age of forty who has made significant contributions to economic thought and knowledge. She was the first non-American-born economist and the first woman to receive the Clark Medal since its inception in 1947.

In 2002, Duflo received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), recognizing outstanding research by a young woman in economics. In 2009, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the so-called "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In 2015, Duflo was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences, one of Spain's most prestigious prizes. In 2019, she received the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, awarded biennially to a top researcher in economics or the social sciences under the age of 40 (though by 2019, the age limit had been adjusted).

Duflo has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). She has been named to Foreign Policy magazine's list of Top 100 Global Thinkers on multiple occasions. The Economist profiled her as one of the most influential economists of her generation. Time magazine included her in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Legacy

Esther Duflo's work has had a substantial impact on the field of development economics and on the practice of evidence-based policymaking around the world. The approach she helped pioneer—using randomized controlled trials to evaluate social programs—has fundamentally altered how governments, NGOs, and international organizations design and assess interventions aimed at reducing poverty. Through J-PAL, her research has informed policies on education, health, governance, and financial inclusion in countries across multiple continents.

Her doctoral students have gone on to establish prominent research careers of their own, extending the methodological and substantive reach of the experimental approach in economics. Notable former doctoral advisees include Emily Breza, Dean Karlan, Rachael Meager, and Vincent Pons, each of whom has made contributions to fields including development economics, behavioral economics, and political economy.

Duflo's public-facing work, particularly through Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, has brought the insights of development economics to a general readership and contributed to a broader public understanding of poverty as a set of specific, addressable problems rather than an undifferentiated condition. Her status as the youngest Nobel laureate in economics and only the second woman to receive the prize has also made her a prominent figure in discussions about gender representation in the economics profession and in academia more broadly.

The institutional infrastructure that Duflo helped build through J-PAL continues to generate new research and policy partnerships. With regional offices on every continent, J-PAL serves as a bridge between academic research and policy implementation, training government officials in the use of evidence and supporting the scale-up of programs that have demonstrated effectiveness through rigorous evaluation. As Duflo continues to take on new institutional roles—at the Paris School of Economics, the University of Zurich, and in various advisory capacities—her influence on both the theory and practice of development economics remains a defining feature of the field in the early 21st century.