Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee Won 2019 Nobel Economics Prize

"This year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research," said the Nobel committee in a statement.

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Abhijit Banerjee, 2019 Nobel Economics Prize

Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on October 14, 2019 for his work in the field of development economics, with particular emphasis on alleviating global poverty.

"This year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research," said the Nobel committee in a statement.

Banerjee, 58, was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT.

Banerjee co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan). He is a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, and a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty.

Banerjee was a president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Econometric Society.

He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. In 2012, he shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book 'Poor Economics'. The next year, he was named by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015.

He also serves on the academic advisory board of Plaksha University, an upcoming Science And Technology University in India.

2019 Nobel Economics Prize Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee