Who is Esther Duflo, 2019 recipient of Nobel Prize in economics?

Esther Duflo is a French American economist and the the recipient of Nobel Prize in economics in 2019. Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

Duflo shares the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". She is the youngest person and the second woman to win this.

Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris. Her father Michel Duflo was a mathematics professor and her mother was a doctor.

Esther married MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, mentioned above, in 2015. They have a child, born in 2012. Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Esther's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999. This is a rare instance of a couple winning the award in the same year and in the same discipline.

Duflo’s study on India has been extensive and in a Livemint interview (https://www.livemint.com/Politics/iioynzsPtsizQTLnlTLM9J/We-might-never-know-the-real-pain-of-note-ban-Esther-Duflo.html) soon after Demonetisation was announced, she said the following:

“I think it is a very dramatic example of very little attention paid to implementation before it (demonetisation) was launched.

“We do not know that (the extent of damage to the economy) yet and we might never know. This is because there is no effective mechanism to measure GDP creation in the informal economy. I was told that informal economy GDP is calculated by indexing it to the formal economy GDP. If that is the case, we might never know the exact magnitude of loss.

“And the government might use these figures to argue that there was no significant setback. People are claiming workers are returning from construction sites to their villages. But there isn’t much high-frequency data on these kinds of things, which would capture the short-run pain.”

Duflo was also one of the 108 social scientists, along with her husband, who blasted the Modi government in March, 2019, and said that India’s statistical machinery had “come under a cloud for being influenced and indeed even controlled by political considerations.”