Economics Nobel For India-Born Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer

Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer will share the Economics Nobel prize for their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty", the Swedish academy announced on Monday. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are married.

Mumbai-born Abhijit Banerjee of the US, his French-American wife Esther Duflo -- a former advisor to ex-US president Barack Obama -- and Michael Kremer of the US were honoured "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," the jury said.

In two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research, the academy said in the release.

Mr Banerjee, 58, and Ms Duflo, 46, are both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, while Mr Kremer, 54, is a professor at Harvard University.

Ms Duflo is only the second woman to win the Nobel Economics Prize in its 50-year existence, following Elinor Ostrom in 2009. The prize amount of 9 million Swedish krona will be shared equally between the three Laureates.

Ms Duflo, who is also the youngest person to ever receive the Economics Prize, told the Nobel committee in a phone interview the honour was "incredibly humbling".

"I didn't think it was possible to win the Nobel Prize in Economics before being significantly older than any of the three of us," she added.

Abhijit Banerjee was born in 1961 in Mumbai, the Nobel Prize website says

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, often with Michael Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics, the academy said.

Abhijit Banerjee remains one of the lab's directors, according to the MIT website. He became an American citizen in 2017.

He is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize.

Mr Banerjee is also the author of a large number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year.

The three will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel.

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