Esther Duflo

• 1. Introduction

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  Esther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She shared that prize in 2019 with her husband Abhijit Banerjee and with Michael Kremer, awarded for what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." The Academy's press release made a striking claim: that their methods "now entirely dominate development economics."

  What had they done to earn that verdict? And how does a historian-in-training who once worked as a research assistant at the Central Bank of Russia in Moscow end up reshaping how the world thinks about poverty? Those questions run through Duflo's story. So does another, quieter one: what happens when scientific evidence collides with the stories people already want to believe about what helps the poor?

• 2. Moscow and the Pivot

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  In 1993, Duflo left Paris for Moscow, working as a French teaching assistant while writing her history master's dissertation. The city was in upheaval. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed, and an American economist named Jeffrey Sachs had been brought in to advise the Russian Ministry of Finance on the transition. Duflo worked as Sachs's assistant.

  The experience recalibrated her entirely. She concluded that "economics had potential as a lever of action in the world" and that she could satisfy her academic ambitions while doing "things that mattered." Moscow is also where she met Thomas Piketty, who urged her to apply to graduate school at MIT.

  She enrolled in MIT's PhD program in economics in 1995, alongside her then-boyfriend Emmanuel Saez. Her very first class in development economics was co-taught by Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. She could not have known those two instructors would one day share a Nobel with her. Her classmates included Eliana La Ferrara, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Jishnu Das, names that would go on to populate the field she was about to help transform.

• 3. The Dissertation Experiment

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  Duflo completed her PhD in 1999 under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist. Her dissertation did not rely on surveys alone or on economic theory applied from a distance. It used a natural experiment: a mass school construction program in Indonesia.

  Published in the American Economic Review, the study showed that children who were between the ages of 2 and 6 in 1974, and who were therefore exposed to the program, received between 0.12 and 0.19 more years of education than those who were not. They also earned higher wages as adults. The paper provided some of the first causal evidence, in a developing-country setting, that additional schooling actually increases future earnings. The distinction between correlation and causation matters here. Before this kind of evidence existed, the link between schooling and wages was assumed more than it was demonstrated.

  The Indonesian school program gave Duflo a template: find a policy shock that nature or governments create, treat it as an experiment, and extract causal conclusions from the variation it generates. That logic would drive much of her work for the next two decades.

• 4. Building J-PAL

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  MIT economics departments rarely hire from their own PhD graduates, but in 2003 the department made an exception. Michael Kremer had left for Harvard University, and Duflo was offered competing positions at Princeton and Yale. MIT promoted her to full professor to keep her, and part of the retention package was funding to start a laboratory.

  Alongside Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, Duflo used that support to found what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL. Its first director was Rachel Glennerster, a British economist who also happened to be the wife of Michael Kremer. In 2005, MIT President Susan Hockfield helped secure an endowment from Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, an MIT alumnus whose name the lab now carries.

  J-PAL's first regional office opened in 2007 in Chennai, India, at the Institute for Financial Management and Research. Since then, offices have followed in Chile, France, South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia. By 2024, the J-PAL network included 900 researchers based at 97 universities around the world. As of 2020, more than 400 million people had been touched by programs that J-PAL affiliated researchers tested and evaluated.

• 5. Testing Received Wisdom

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  One of Duflo's most consequential research threads challenged something the development world had embraced with great confidence: microfinance. Microcredit had been celebrated as a near-certain path out of poverty, celebrated widely and largely without systematic evidence behind that confidence.

  Working with Cynthia Kinnan, Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, Duflo partnered with a microcredit firm in Hyderabad, India, to run a randomized controlled trial. The results were unsettling for the industry. Microfinance could help some individuals start businesses or acquire assets, but the study found little evidence that it raised overall household consumption. The microfinance industry responded negatively. Years later, in 2019, a former PhD student of Duflo named Rachael Meager published a meta-analysis in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the conclusion held: little evidence that microfinance raises consumption or encourages household small business creation.

  Duflo also examined how gender shapes the flow of resources inside households. She used a large increase in old-age pension values in South Africa in 1991 as her natural experiment. When elderly women, the grandmothers, received the pension increase, the body mass index of young girls in those households rose. When only an elderly man received the pension, no such effect appeared. The finding suggested that putting resources in the hands of older female family members may translate more directly into nutrition and wellbeing for girls.

• 6. Learning What Works in Schools

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  In 2007, Duflo published a study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics alongside Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Leigh Linden. The subject was a remedial education program in India aimed at pupils who had been "left behind" in the school system. The program worked: learning outcomes improved substantially. What did not work, the researchers found, was providing textbooks, even in schools in Kenya that lacked many essential inputs.

  The Nobel committee later summarized what field tests in the city of Vadodara had found: fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math questions. That figure helped make the case that simply enrolling more children in school, without reforming what happens inside the classroom, was insufficient. Duflo and Banerjee argued that policies focused on school access had to be paired with efforts to improve school quality.

  That body of work helped spread a specific teaching model called Teaching at the Right Level, or TaRL, which targets instruction to where pupils actually are in mathematics and reading, rather than where the curriculum assumes they should be. The research connections Duflo built at MIT in 1995 had, by this point, produced evidence that was reshaping pedagogy in some of the world's largest school systems.

• 7. The Nobel and Its Aftermath

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  When Duflo received the Nobel call in 2019, she responded by telephone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She described the timing as "extremely opportune and important" and said she hoped the prize would inspire many other women to continue working and "many other men to give them the respect that they deserve, like every single human being." She also said she intended to use the award as a "megaphone" in efforts to tackle poverty and improve children's education.

  French President Emmanuel Macron offered congratulations, calling it a reminder that French economists are "currently among the best in the world." The prize was not without controversy in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu nationalist party then in power, publicly criticized the selection, with some party members suggesting that Banerjee had been favored because he was married to Duflo, a white European woman, which they described as a violation of Hindu preference for endogamy.

  Duflo was the second woman ever to receive this prize, after Elinor Ostrom in 2009. In 2024, she assumed the presidency of the Paris School of Economics. In October 2025, the University of Zurich announced that both Duflo and Banerjee would join the faculty of the UZH School of Business, Economics, and Informatics in July 2026, extending a collaboration that began in a classroom at MIT in 1995.