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Updated: Oct 14, 2019 17:47 IST

Indian-American Abhijit Banerjee was among three economists to win the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

Banerjee will share the prize with French-American Esther Duflo and American Michael Kremer.

“The laureates have played a decisive role in reshaping research in development economics. Their research has already helped in alleviating global poverty and has great potential to further improve the lives of the most impoverished people on the planet,” the academy said in a statement.

Here’s more about Abhijit Banerjee:

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, born on February 21, 1961, was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University from where he obtained his master’s degree in economics. He completed his doctoral studies at Harvard in 1988.

The tile of this doctoral thesis is Essays in Information Economics and his fields of interest are economic development, information theory, the theory of income distribution and macroeconomics.

Banerjee taught at Harvard and Princeton before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT.

He founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. He remains one of the lab’s directors.

Banerjee was the president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Center for Economics and Policy Research research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute.

He also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys Prize.

He is the author of a number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics. It won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films.

He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit Banerjee is married to Esther Duflo and they have a child born in 2012. Abhijit Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo’s PhD in economics at MIT in 1999.