ABHIJIT BANERJEE

Abhijit Banerjee is an Indian-American development economist who shared the 2019 ‘Nobel Memorial Prize ‘ in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo, his wife , and Michael Kremer , fellow economist from Harvard University ” . Banerjee and Duflo, both professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize.

Banerjee is the director of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which he had co-founded with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. He has previously taught economics at Harvard University and Princeton University . He has authored seven books so far , most popular of which is ‘Poor Economics’ , co-written with Duflo.

Abhijit Binayak Banerjee was born on February 21, 1961 in Calcutta , now Kolkata , the capital of state of West Bengal , India , to Nirmala and Dipak Banerjee . His mother was a professor of economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, while his father was a professor and the head of Department of Economics at Presidency College , Calcutta.

A student of prestigious , South Point School , he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in economics from Presidency College , Calcutta in1981, before completing his Master’s degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University , Delhi , in 1983. He subsequently went to study at Harvard University and got his Ph.D in economics in1988 for the thesis paper ‘Essays in Information Economics’. Abhijit Banerjee began his professional career as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Princeton University in 1988 and stayed in that position until 1992 . In 2003 , with economics Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan , he co-founded Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab , a Global Research Centre working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence . He was the president of Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development in 2003-04 . in 2004 , he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became a member of the Council of the Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research . Two years later , he became an International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute and was made Honorary Consultant in PEO , Planning Commission, in India . In 2011, he co-authored the book ‘Poor Economics’, his fourth book , with his then partner and colleague Esther Duflo. The book was translated into over 17 languages and won the 2011 ‘Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

In 2000, Abhijit Banerjee was honored with the ‘Mahalanobis Memorial Medal’ in India nd received the ‘Malcolm Adeshesiah Award’ the following year . he was the recipient of the inaugural ‘Infosys Award in Social Sciences’ in the category of economics in 2009 . In 2014, he was awarded the Bernhard-Harms-prize from the Kiel Institute foe the World Economy and received an Honorary Doctoral degree from KU Leuven. along with his wife Esther Duflo and fellow economist Michael Kremer, he received the ‘Nobel Memorial Prize’ in Economic Sciences in October 2019.