Banerjee, Duflo, Kremer win Nobel Prize in economics

FT ONLINE

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics of this year on Monday for research on alleviating global poverty.

Indian-born Abhijit Banerjee is an American citizen while Esther Duflo is French-American. Michael Kremer is also from the US.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in a press release, said the trio pioneered an approach to poverty reduction that was based on carefully designed experiments that sought answers to specific policy questions, report CNN and NDTV.

Abhijit Banerjee, 58, was born in India and has a PhD from Harvard University. He is a Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the youngest person and second woman to be awarded the prize.

Kremer, a professor at Harvard, used field work to test how school results could be improved in western Kenya during the mid-1990s.

"This year's laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," organisers said in the statement.