London (CNN Business) A trio of economists were awarded the Nobel Prize on Monday for their work to alleviate global poverty.

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer pioneered an approach to poverty reduction that was based on carefully designed experiments that sought answers to specific policy questions, according to the prize committee.

Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the youngest person and second woman to be awarded the prize. Mumbai-born Banerjee, her husband, is also a professor at MIT.

Kremer, a professor at Harvard, used field work to test how school results could be improved in western Kenya during the mid-1990s.

As a direct result of their research, more than 5 million Indian children had benefited from remedial tutoring in schools, while many countries had introduced heavy subsidies for preventive health care, according to a statement from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize.

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