Abhijit Banerjee

Poor Economics (2011) takes the largest question in development and breaks it into answerable pieces: whether a mosquito net works better given away or sold, why a household short of food buys a television, what keeps children in school. Abhijit Banerjee wrote it with Esther Duflo, his MIT colleague and later his wife, out of fifteen years of field experiments, and the two shared the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for it. Born in Mumbai in 1961, Banerjee studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University, then completed a doctorate at Harvard in 1988. He is Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, where in 2003 he set up the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. He, Duflo and Michael Kremer shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019.