Esther Duflo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Esther Duflo (born 1972) is a French economist, currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She first studied at the French École normale supérieure, where she graduated in history and economics. In 1999, she was hired as an assistant professor by the MIT department of economics, joining the department immediately after she completed her Ph.D., also at MIT. She was promoted to associate professor (with tenure) in 2002, at the age of 29, making her among the youngest faculty at the Institute to be awarded tenure.
Her major research focus is on Development economics, with an emphasis on health, education, and provision of credit. Together with Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.
She was awarded the Elaine Bennet Prize for Research by the American Economic Association in 2003. This prize honors a woman economist under the age of forty who has made outstanding contributions in any field of economic research. In 2005, Le Monde awarded her the Best Young French Economist prize.
Esther Duflo serves as a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Development Economics, and in 2007 was named founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
She is currently a co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and writes a monthly column for Libération, a French daily.
The US magazine Foreign Policy named her as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008.[1]
