Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (born 21 February 1961) is an Indian-born American economist. Together with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his use of randomized controlled trials to alleviate global poverty (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2019).

Background

Banerjee studied at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and later at Harvard University, where in 1988 he obtained a doctoral degree in economics. After teaching at Harvard and Princeton, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming a full professor in 1996. Together with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, and remains one of the two Directors of that global research center.

Research

Banerjee's research and its impact will be summarized in a forthcoming entry on the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.