Esther Duflo was born in Paris, where her mother was a pediatrician and her father a professor of mathematics. After studying history and economics at the École Normale Superieure and elsewhere, she completed her doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999. Aside from a leave at Princeton University, she has continued to work at MIT. Esther Duflo married her research colleague, Abhijit Banerjee, with whom she also shared the Economics Prize.

One of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. It involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions. Since the mid-1990s, they have been able to test a range of interventions in different areas using field experiments, for example for improving educational outcomes or child health.