Abhijit Banerjee was born in Mumbai, India. He came to the United States to pursue a PhD in economics at Harvard University, which he completed in 1988. He is now the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2003, Banerjee cofounded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.
In 2019, Banerjee, Esther Duflo, his research partner and wife, and colleague Michael Kremer received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
Banerjee sees his work as an outgrowth of his early life in India. Although his family was middle class, their home was “right next to a slum. And I think it makes a difference that I grew up with poorer people,” he says. “I saw that there were intelligent, interesting people in the slum. They were my friends and we played together.”
Banerjee is the coauthor (with Duflo) of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems (2019). He is a trustee of Save the Children USA, a trustee of the British Museum, and chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel.
