Abhijit Banerjee was born to a BengaliHindu family in Bombay, Maharashtra, India. His father, Dipak Banerjee, was a Bengali Indian professor of economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and his mother Nirmala Banerjee, a Marathi Indian professor of economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His father, Dipak Banerjee, earned a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He received his school education in South Point High School, a renowned educational institution in Calcutta. After his schooling, he took admission at Presidency College, then an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta and now an autonomous university, where he completed his BSc degree in economics in 1981. Later, he completed his M.A. in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 1983. While studying in JNU, he was arrested and imprisoned in Tihar Jail during a protest after students gheraoed the then Vice Chancellor PN Srivastava of the university. He was released on bail and charges were subsequently dropped against the students. Later, he went on to obtain a PhD in Harvard University in 1988. The subject of his doctoral thesis was "Essays in Information Economics."
Career
Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he has taught at Harvard University and Princeton University. His work focuses on development economics. Together with Esther Duflo he has discussed field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. He was also honored with the Infosys Prize 2009 in the social sciences category of economics. He is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of social sciences. In 2012, he shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book Poor Economics. In 2013, he was named by the United Nations Secretary GeneralBan Ki-Moon to a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. In 2014, he received the Bernhard-Harms-Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. In 2019, he delivered Export-Import Bank of India's 34th Commencement Day Annual Lecture on Redesigning Social Policy. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, together with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, for their work alleviating global poverty.
Research
Banerjee and his co-workers try to measure the effectiveness of actions in improving people's lives. For this, they use randomized controlled trials, similar to clinical trials in medical research. For example, although polio vaccination is freely available in India, many mothers were not bringing their children for the vaccination drives. Banerjee and Prof. Esther Duflo, also from MIT, tried an experiment in Rajasthan, where they gifted a bag of pulses to mothers who vaccinated their children. Soon, the immunization rate went up in the region. In another experiment, they found that learning outcomes improved in schools that were provided with teaching assistants to help students with special needs.
Personal life
Abhijit Banerjee was married to Dr. Arundhati Tuli Banerjee, a lecturer of literature at MIT. Abhijit and Arundhati had one son together and later divorced. His son Kabir Banerjee, from his first marriage, died in an accident in 2016. In 2015, Banerjee married his co-researcher, MIT professor Esther Duflo; they have two children. Banerjee was a joint supervisor of Duflo's PhD in economics at MIT in 1999. Duflo is also a Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT.
Publications
Books
Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak. A Short History of Poverty Measurements. Juggernaut Books.
Awards
Abhijit Banerjee was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 along with his two co-researchers Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted: "Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics." The Nobel committee commented:
He has been awarded the Doctor of Letters by the University of Calcutta in January 2020.
