Who is Abhijit Banerjee? Indian-origin economist who has won Nobel Prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday awarded Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences. Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, have been conferred with the honour "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, 58, was born in Mumbai (India) and attended South Point School in the city. He went to Presidency College, Calcutta, where he completed his BS degree in Economics in 1981. He completed his M.A. in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1983. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1988.

Also read: Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee is JNU alumnus, studied MA in Economics in 1983

He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had also taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.

Banerjee is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan), a research affiliate of Innovations for poverty action, and a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty.

Together with Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, he has proposed field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.

In 2012, he shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book 'Poor Economics'. Next year, he was named by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015.

Edited by Chitranjan Kumar

Also read: Indian-origin economist Abhijit Banerjee awarded Nobel Prize