— Ch. 1 · Paris Roots And Moscow Awakening —
Esther Duflo.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Esther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris, France. Her father taught mathematics while her mother worked as a pediatrician and volunteered for humanitarian NGOs supporting children affected by war. She grew up in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris, before attending the Lycée Henri-IV, a magnet school in central Paris. After secondary school she enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure to study history and economics. Daniel Cohen recruited her to focus on economics instead of history. From 1993 to 1994 she served as a French teaching assistant in Moscow where she wrote her history master's dissertation. During that time she worked as a research assistant at the Central Bank of Russia and assisted Jeffrey Sachs who advised the Russian Ministry of Finance after the Soviet Union collapsed. The experience led her to conclude that economics had potential as a lever of action in the world. She could satisfy academic ambitions while doing things that mattered.
MIT Tenure And Lab Founding
Duflo completed her PhD in 1999 under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist. Her dissertation examined a large-scale school expansion program in Indonesia to study education effects on future earnings. After earning her degree she became an assistant professor of economics at MIT. Economics professors are rarely hired from their own PhD programs but the department made an exception following Michael Kremer's departure to Harvard University. From 2001 to 2002 Duflo took leave for a visiting position at Princeton University. Upon returning she was promoted to Associate Professor and became among the youngest faculty members in the department's history to receive tenure. In 2003 she was promoted to full professor after receiving competing offers from Princeton and Yale. Alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan she secured funding to found a laboratory aimed at promoting randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation. The Poverty Action Lab was initially led by Rachel Glennerster who was married to Michael Kremer. In 2005 with support from MIT President Susan Hockfield the lab was endowed by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel. As of 2024 the J-PAL network included 900 researchers based at 97 universities around the world.