Overview
Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 (jointly with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer) for her experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. In addition to development economics, her methodological contributions span causal inference in panel settings.
Key Contributions / Features
- Serial correlation in DiD (Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan 2003): Co-established the serial correlation problem in multi-period DiD and the clustered standard errors solution.
- Nobel Prize (2019): Recognized for "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty" — large-scale RCTs evaluating education, health, and poverty interventions in developing countries.
- J-PAL: Co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, the leading research hub for RCT-based development economics.
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