1. Since 2024, Esther Duflo has served as the president of the Paris School of Economics alongside her appointment at MIT.
24 Facts About Esther Duflo
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Esther Duflo is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
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Esther Duflo's research focuses on the microeconomics of development and spans topics such as household behavior, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and health.
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Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo is the co-author of Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively.
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Esther Duflo was born on 25 October 1972 to Violaine and Michel Esther Duflo at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris, France.
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Esther Duflo's father was a mathematics professor, and her mother was a pediatrician.
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Esther Duflo was raised and attended schools until grade 11 in Asnieres, a western suburb of Paris.
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Esther Duflo completed her secondary schooling in 1990 at the Lycee Henri-IV, a magnet school in central Paris.
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Esther Duflo intended to study history prior to beginning her degree, but was recruited to study economics by Daniel Cohen.
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Esther Duflo finished her degree in history and economics at Ecole Normale Superieure in 1994 and received a master's degree from DELTA, now the Paris School of Economics, in 1995.
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Esther Duflo gained admission to MIT's PhD program in economics, and enrolled alongside her then-boyfriend, Emmanuel Saez, in 1995 after finishing her master's degree.
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Esther Duflo completed her PhD in 1999, under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.
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From 2001 to 2002, Esther Duflo took leave from MIT to pursue a visiting academic position at Princeton University.
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In 2003, Esther Duflo was promoted to full professor after receiving competing offers from Princeton and Yale.
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Alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, Esther Duflo secured additional funding as part of her retention offer to found a laboratory aimed at promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation.
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Alongside her work at J-PAL, Esther Duflo is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
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Esther Duflo is former editor-in-chief of the American Economic Review, was the founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and previously served on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of Development Economics.
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Esther Duflo's research focuses on a range of topics in the microeconomics of development, such as health, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and household behavior.
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Alongside Cynthia Kinnan, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, Esther Duflo partnered with a microcredit firm in Hyderabad, India to conduct a randomized controlled trial on the effects of expanding access to microfinance on development outcomes of interest.
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Esther Duflo is married to MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee; the couple have two children.
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Esther Duflo has published numerous papers, receiving 6,200 citations in 2017.
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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".
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Esther Duflo is the youngest person and the second woman to win this award.
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Esther 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.