This year's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and Harvard’s Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

Duflo, 46, is the youngest recipient of the award and only the second woman to win the prize. She was the John Bates Clark Medal winner in 2010 and is the current editor of the American Economic Review. 

In its announcement Monday, the Academy credited the three economists for transforming development economics and obtaining reliable answers about the ways to fight global poverty, which it called “one of humanity’s most urgent issues.”

The researchers’ work divided the problem into smaller, more manageable questions, such as creating effective interventions for improving educational outcomes and child health. “They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected,” the Academy said in announcing the prize.

Kremer began using field experiments in the 1990s to test a range of interventions for improving schools in Kenya. Banerjee and Duflo soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries. Their methods now dominate the field of development economics.

Banerjee and Duflo, who together cofounded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Sendhil Mullainathan, also have a new book coming out next month called “Good Economics for Hard Times.”

The full Nobel announcement can be read here:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/press-release/