JNU Alumni Abhijit Banerjee And Wife Win Nobel In Economics

Stockholm: Indian-American and Economics professor at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics jointly with his wife Esther Duflo and another economist Michael Kremer on Monday.

Banerjee was awarded the Nobel for his work "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Born in Mumbai in 1961, the 58-year-old economist is an alumunus of South Point School in the city and Presidency College, Calcutta, where he completed his BSC degree in economics in 1981. He also studied at the University of Calcutta and Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

He received his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University.

He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including 'Poor Economics', which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011. The 'Poor Economics' has been translated into more than 17 languages.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee congratulated Banerjee for the coveted prize.

"Hearty congratulations to Abhijit Banerjee, alumnus of South Point School & Presidency College Kolkata, for winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Another Bengali has done the nation proud. We are overjoyed," Banerjee said in a tweet.

Duflo, born 1972 in Paris, received her PhD in 1999 from MIT. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies.

With Banerjee, she co-authored the book, 'Poor Economics'.

Duflo is the Editor of the American Economic Review. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

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