Short answers, pulled from the story.
Esther Duflo received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.
J-PAL, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, is an MIT-based research center that promotes the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation. It was co-founded by Esther Duflo alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, and was endowed in 2005 by MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel with support from MIT President Susan Hockfield. By 2024, its network included 900 researchers at 97 universities worldwide.
Duflo's PhD dissertation, published in the American Economic Review, studied a mass school construction program in Indonesia and found that children exposed to the program received between 0.12 and 0.19 more years of education and earned higher wages as adults. The study provided some of the first causal evidence in a developing-country context that increased schooling leads to higher earnings.
Duflo and her co-authors conducted a randomized controlled trial with a microcredit firm in Hyderabad, India, and found little evidence that access to microfinance raised overall household consumption. A 2019 meta-analysis by former Duflo PhD student Rachael Meager, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, confirmed those findings across multiple geographic contexts.
Duflo studied a large increase in old-age pension values in South Africa in 1991 and found that when elderly women received the pension increase, the body mass index of young girls in those households rose. No equivalent effect was found when only an elderly man received the pension, suggesting that girls benefit when a larger share of household resources is controlled by older female family members.
Yes. Esther Duflo was 46 years old when she received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019, making her the youngest person ever to win the award. She was also only the second woman to receive it, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009.