Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris, the daughter of
pediatrician Violaine Duflo and mathematics professor
Michel Duflo. During Duflo's childhood, her mother often participated in medical humanitarian projects.[29][30]
After studying in the
B/L program of
Lycée Henri-IV's
Classes préparatoires, Duflo began her undergraduate studies at
École normale supérieure in Paris, planning to study history, her interest since childhood. In her second year, she began considering a career in the civil service or politics. She spent ten months in
Moscow starting in 1993. She taught French and worked on a history thesis that described how the
Soviet Union "had used the big construction sites, like the
Stalingrad tractor factory, for propaganda, and how propaganda requirements changed the actual shape of the projects." In Moscow, she also worked as a research assistant for a French economist connected to the
Central Bank of Russia and, separately, for
Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist who was advising the
Russian Minister of Finance. The experiences at these research posts led her to conclude that "economics had potential as a lever of action in the world" and she could satisfy academic ambitions while doing "things that mattered".[29]
After earning her PhD in 1999, Duflo became an assistant professor at MIT. She was promoted to associate professor (with
tenure) in 2002, at 29, making her among the youngest faculty members to be awarded tenure, and to full professor in 2003.[29]
Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have taken a special interest in India since 1997. In 2003, she conducted a trial experiment on teacher absenteeism in 120 schools run by a non-profit group. By encouraging the teachers to photograph themselves with their students each day, she was able to reduce their absenteeism.[29]
In 2003, she co-founded
Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which has since conducted over 200 empirical development experiments and trained development practitioners to run
randomized controlled trials.[32] The lab has branches in
Chennai, India and at the Paris School of Economics.[33] In 2004, together with several colleagues, Duflo conducted another experiment in India. It showed that taped speeches by women were more readily accepted in villages that had experienced women leaders. Duflo became increasingly convinced that communities supporting women candidates could expect economic benefits, but she experienced difficulty in convincing her peers.[29] Focused on assessing developments addressing social welfare, in 2008, she received the
Frontier of Knowledge award for development cooperation.[34][35] Duflo entered the public sphere in 2013, when she sat on the new Global Development Committee, which advised former US President Barack Obama on issues regarding development aid in poor countries.[36]
In 2020, it was announced that Duflo would become chair of the Fund for Innovation in Development, an organization hosted by the
French Development Agency that provides grants to develop and scale interventions for poverty and inequality.[42]
Since August 2023, she holds a weekly chronicle on French radio station France Inter, "Le biais d'Esther Duflo".[43]
In January 2024, Duflo was unanimously elected president of the Paris School of Economics, succeeding the late
Daniel Cohen who died in August 2023. The term of the presidency is five years.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
Personal life
Duflo is married to MIT professor
Abhijit Banerjee; the couple have two children.[44][45] Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.[29]
Selected works
Books
In April 2011, Duflo released her book Poor Economics, co-authored with Banerjee. It documents their 15 years of experience in conducting randomized control trials to alleviate poverty.[46] The book has received critical acclaim.
Nobel laureateAmartya Sen called it "a marvelously insightful book by the two outstanding researchers on the real nature of poverty."[47][48]
Duflo has published numerous papers, receiving 6,200 citations in 2017. Most of them have appeared in the top five economic journals.[33]
Awards
Nobel prize in Economic Sciences
Esther Duflo was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2019 along with her two co-researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Duflo is the youngest person (at age 46) and the second woman to win this award (after
Elinor Ostrom in 2009).[49][50][51]
Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover, in the Indian context Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of
Vadodara fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions.[52]
In response to such findings, Banerjee, Duflo and co-authors argued that efforts to get more children into school must be complemented by reforms to improve school quality.[52]
Responding by telephone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Duflo explained that she received the prize "at an extremely opportune and important time" and hoped that it would "inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve, like every single human being."[53] She also revealed that she wanted to use the award as a "megaphone" in her fighting efforts to tackle poverty and to improve children's education.[54]
French President
Emmanuel Macron offered his congratulations: "Esther Duflo's magnificent Nobel Prize is a reminder that French economists are currently among the best in the world and shows that research in that field can have concrete impact on human welfare."[55]
Much of the discussion related to the prize shared by Duflo and her co-laureates focused on their influential use of
randomized controlled trials in designing their experiments.[56] Summarizing the research approach which she had utilized along with Banerjee and Kremer, Duflo said simply, "Our goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on
scientific evidence."[57]
Duflo came under criticism from the
Bharatiya Janata Party, a
Hindu nationalist party currently in power in India, due to the party's displeasure over her husband Abhijit Banerjee achieving the Nobel Prize. Many within the party derogatorily commented that Banerjee had been preferred by the
Nobel committee over other Hindu academicians, due to him marrying a white European woman (viz Duflo), which was in violation of the Hindu preference for
endogamy.[58]
In 2008, The Economist listed Duflo as one of the top eight young economists in the world.[61]
In May 2008, the American magazine Foreign Policy named her as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world.[62]
In 2009, she was named a
MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a "
genius" grant.[63] She is also a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009.[64] On 21 May 2009, she was selected as the first recipient of the
Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which she finally received on 4 June 2010. The prize is awarded every two years to a top young researcher in economics or the social sciences for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.[65]
She is a recipient of the 2010
John Bates Clark Medal for economists under 40 who have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.[66] In the autumn of 2010, she was named to Fortune magazine's
40 Under 40 list.[67] She received her (first) honorary doctorate from the
Université catholique de Louvain, on 2 February 2010.[68]
In 2010, Foreign Policy again named her to its list of top 100 global thinkers.[69]
In 2015, she received the A.SK Social Sciences Award from the
WZB Berlin Social Science Center, one of the world's largest awards in the social sciences, which is endowed with US$200,000.[77]
^Clement, Douglas (December 2011).
"Interview with Esther Duflo". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Archived from
the original on 16 November 2019. Retrieved 14 October 2019.