Esther Duflo, who receives an honorary doctorate on the recommendation of Erasmus School of Economics on Friday, 8 November, is one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2019.
The Swedish academy of sciences announced on Monday, 14 October that Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer are awarded the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel for research findings that have “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice”.
Second woman to win Nobel prize in economics
Duflo becomes the second woman and the youngest person to win the Nobel economics prize. The key to the research of Duflo, Banerjee and Kremer is to take the issue of global poverty and break it down into smaller pieces. They have shown that these more manageable questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected.
Michael Kremer and his colleagues showed how effective this approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who are married, preformed similar studies of equivalent issues in different countries.
Keynote ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’ on 8 November
Prior to the honorary doctorate ceremony on 8 November, Esther Duflo gives a keynote, in which she introduces her new book ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’, co-authored with her husband Abhijit Banerjee. They use the best recent economics to demonstrate how to think about these problems differently. Furthermore, they present intelligent, daring solutions based on sound research into real-life situations, towards a society built on compassion and respect.
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For more information, please contact Ronald de Groot, Communications Officer at Erasmus School of Economics: rdegroot@ese.eur.nl, mobile phone: +31 6 53641 846.
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