Esther Duflo (born October 25, 1972) is a French economist, currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and in 2009 was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as a "genius" grant. She is a recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal for economists under the age of forty who are judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.[1] She is also the first recipient of the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which is awarded every two years to a top young researcher in economics or the social sciences for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.[2]
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, gender and politics, and provision of credit. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, 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. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2009. She received her (first) honorary doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Feb 2, 2010.[3]
Esther Duflo serves as founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics, and is a member of the editorial committee of the Annual Review of 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.[4] The Economist lists Duflo as one of the top 8 young economists in the world.[5]
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