Esther Duflo
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
In addition to her academic appointment, Duflo is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, an MIT-based research center promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation. As of 2020, more than 400 million people had been impacted by programs tested by J-PAL affiliated researchers. Since 2024, Duflo has also served as the president of the Paris School of Economics alongside her appointment at MIT. In October 2025, the University of Zurich announced that Duflo and Banerjee would be joining the faculty of the UZH School of Business, Economics, and Informatics in July 2026.
Duflo is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research focuses on the microeconomics of development and spans topics such as household behavior, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and health. Prior to receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Duflo was awarded the Calvó-Armengol International Prize, the Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association.
Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Duflo is the co-author of Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.
Early life and education
Duflo was born on 25 October 1972 to Violaine and Michel Duflo at the Port Royal Hospital in Paris, France. Her father was a mathematics professor, and her mother was a pediatrician. During Duflo's childhood, her mother often traveled, volunteering for a humanitarian NGO providing support to childhood victims of war. Duflo was raised and attended schools until grade 11 in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris. Duflo completed her secondary schooling in 1990 at the Lycée Henri-IV, a magnet school in central Paris.After secondary school, Duflo pursued an undergraduate degree at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she specialized in history and economics. She intended to study history prior to beginning her degree, but was recruited to study economics by Daniel Cohen. From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a French teaching assistant in Moscow, where she wrote her history master's dissertation. In Moscow, she worked as a research assistant at the Central Bank of Russia, and as an assistant to Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist selected to advise the Russian Ministry of Finance in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The experience led her to conclude that "economics had potential as a lever of action in the world" and she could satisfy academic ambitions while doing "things that mattered".
She finished her degree in history and economics at École Normale Supérieure in 1994 and received a master's degree from DELTA, now the Paris School of Economics, in 1995. While in Moscow, Duflo met Thomas Piketty, who encouraged her to apply for graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She gained admission to MIT's PhD program in economics, and enrolled alongside her then-boyfriend, Emmanuel Saez, in 1995 after finishing her master's degree. Duflo's first class in development economics was co-taught by Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, with whom she would later share the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Her classmates at the time include several prominent development economists, including Eliana La Ferrara, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Jishnu Das.
Duflo completed her PhD in 1999, under the joint supervision of Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist. Her dissertation research leveraged a natural experiment —a large-scale school expansion program in Indonesia — to study the effects of education on future earnings, providing the first causal evidence that increased schooling improves earnings later in life.
Career
After completing her PhD in 1999, Duflo became an assistant professor of economics at MIT, her alma mater. Economics professors are rarely hired from the PhD students in their own departments; however, following the departure of Michael Kremer to Harvard University, the department made an exception to strengthen MIT's development economics group. From 2001 to 2002, Duflo took leave from MIT to pursue a visiting academic position at Princeton University. Upon her return, she was promoted to Associate Professor and became among the youngest faculty members in the department's history to be offered tenure.In 2003, Duflo was promoted to full professor after receiving competing offers from Princeton and Yale. Alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, Duflo secured additional funding as part of her retention offer to found a laboratory aimed at promoting the use of randomized controlled trials in policy evaluation. The Poverty Action Lab was initially led by Rachel Glennerster, a British economist and the wife of Michael Kremer, co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In 2005, with the support of MIT President Susan Hockfield, the Poverty Action Lab was endowed by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, an MIT alumnus and president of the Abdul Latif Jameel corporation.
In line with Duflo and Banerjee's experience in the Indian context, J-PAL's first regional office was founded in 2007 in Chennai at the Institute for Financial Management and Research. Additional regional offices have since been founded at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the Paris School of Economics, the University of Cape Town, American University in Cairo, and the University of Indonesia. As of 2024, the J-PAL network included 900 researchers based at 97 universities around the world. Many prominent development economists serve on the board of the organization, including Marianne Bertrand, Chris Blattman, Pascaline Dupas, and Amy Finkelstein.
Alongside her work at J-PAL, Duflo is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a board member at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and director of the development economics program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Since 2023, she has held the Poverty and Public Policy Chair at the Collège de France, and in 2024 assumed the presidency of the Paris School of Economics. She is former editor-in-chief of the American Economic Review, was the founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and previously served on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of Development Economics.
Duflo has also held several advisory appointments in government. As of 2024, she was a member of the economic advisory committee of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. From 2012 to 2017, she served on the Global Development Council of President Barack Obama, led by economist Mohamed El-Erian.
Research
Duflo's research focuses on a range of topics in the microeconomics of development, such as health, education, financial inclusion, political economy, gender, and household behavior. Much of her research leverages randomized controlled trials to evaluate the causal effects of social interventions on development outcomes of interest.Education
Duflo's dissertation research examined the labor market returns to education through analysis of a unique policy experiment: a mass school construction program in Indonesia. Published in the American Economic Review, the study showed that children exposed to the program received between 0.12 and 0.19 more years of education and had higher wages in adulthood. The paper provided some of the first causal evidence in a developing country context that increased education does lead to increased wages.Among Duflo's most recognized work leverages randomized impact evaluations to study interventions aimed at improving educational outcomes in the developing world. In 2007, Duflo — alongside co-authors Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Leigh Linden — published a study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics evaluating a remedial education program aimed at improving learning outcomes of those "left behind" in Indian schools. They found that the program substantially improved learning outcomes, in contrast to other interventions such as providing textbooks. Their research has encouraged the proliferation of "Teaching at the Right Level ", an educational program aimed at improving learning outcomes by providing targeted instruction to primary school pupils behind on mathematics and reading.