Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a co-founder and director of the Poverty Action Lab, Research Associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research, and on the board of directors of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She is also the co-director of the CEPR Development Economics programme and editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. She received her undergraduate degree in history and economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) in 1994, a master’s in economics from DELTA (Paris) in 1995, and her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999. She is the recipient of the Bronze Medal from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (2005), Le Monde’s Cercle des économistes Best Young French Economist Prize (2005), and the Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003). Duflo specializes in development economics and the design and evaluation of effective anti-poverty policy. She has studied household behavior, educational choice and returns to education, decentralization, industrial organization in developing countries, and credit constraints.
