CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — The three winners of the Nobel Prize in economics are donating their prize money to fund grants that will support economic research for the next 15 years.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael Kremer, of Harvard University, will donate their prize money to the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics, which is administered by Harvard University.

Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer were honored by the Nobel Committee for their research on fighting global poverty.

“As a child, I read about Marie Curie who used the proceeds of her first Nobel prize to buy a gram of radium to further her research,” said Duflo. “Our field is a collaborative one, so supporting the next generation of economists is our ‘gram of radium.’”


The donation of approximately $916,000 will fund development economists and students’ research until 2035, The Boston Globe reported. The Weiss Fund has supported development economics research at select universities in the United States since 2012.