Bengali-origin economist, wife win Nobel Prize in Economics

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." 

Partners in Life and Science: Married couples who won the Nobel Prize

Here is an interesting trend among winners: The Nobel Prize in Economics: Esther Duflo is the doctoral student and also wife of Abhijit Banerjee. Abhijit is a doctoral student of Eric Maskin, who won Nobel Prize in 2007. Eric is a doctoral student of Kenneth Arrow, who won Nobel Prize in 1972.

Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the winners this year of Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

After the announcement, Esther Duflo said at a press conference, "Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognised for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect they deserve." 

Amartya Sen was the first Bengali economist who won Nobel prize in 1998 for his work in welfare economics.

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, 58, was born in Kolkata of India. He completed masters' in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1983 and doctorate at Harvard in 1988. He attended South Point School and Presidency College in Kolkata. Now a professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Abhijit had also taught at Harvard University and Princeton University.

Banerjee and his wife and co-Nobel laureate Duflo were the authors of Poor Economics.

They are co-founders of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a research affiliate of Innovations for poverty action.

2019 Economic Sciences Laureate Esther Duflo, born in 1972, is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences. She and her husband Abhijit Bannerjee, both from MIT, shared this year's Nobel prize in economics with Kremer.

The Nobel Prize's official tweet said, the 2019 Economic Sciences Laureates' research findings have dramatically improved our ability to fight global poverty in practice. As a result of one of their studies, more than 5 million Indian children have benefitted from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools.

In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.

In the mid-1990s, Economic Sciences Laureate Michael Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful an experiment-based approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya.

2019 Economic Sciences Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, often with Michael Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries, including India. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.

Over 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, five million children still die before their fifth birthday, often from diseases that could be prevented or cured with relatively cheap and simple treatments.
This year's Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. It divides this issue into smaller, more manageable questions – for example, the most effective interventions for improving child health.