Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. She is the youngest person and only second woman to win the Nobel economics prize. As co-director of J-PAL at MIT, she has overseen hundreds of randomised controlled trials evaluating development interventions across health, education, microfinance, and social protection. Her research has directly influenced policy across dozens of countries and influenced how impact investors and development finance institutions evaluate program effectiveness. Her methodological contributions — particularly her work on identification strategies using natural experiments and encouragement designs when full randomization is infeasible — have strengthened causal inference standards across development economics and expanded the set of policy questions that can be rigorously evaluated, raising the overall quality of evidence used to allocate development finance toward programs that demonstrably improve outcomes for the poorest populations globally.