Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab’s directors. Banerjee is a past President of the Bureau for Research and 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. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys Prize.  

 Abhijit is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including ‘Poor Economics’, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’, both co-authored with Esther Duflo. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his ground-breaking work in development economics research.  

More about Abhijit Banerjee and the 2019 Prize in Economic Sciences 

Photo: © Bryce Vickmark.