Abhijit Banerjee

Banerjee is a co-founder of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan). He is a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action and a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. Banerjee was a president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Econometric Society. He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the co-author of Poor Economics. He also serves on the academic advisory board of Plaksha University, an upcoming science and technology university in India. His new book, co-authored with Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times, was released in October 2019 in India by Juggernaut Books.

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.

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".

In 2014, he received the Bernhard-Harms-Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

In 2013, he was named by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 (their expiration date).

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 (economics). In 2012, he shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business Book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book Poor Economics.

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 (born 1991), 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.

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(H) degree in economics in 1981. Later, he completed his M.A. in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 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."

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (pronounced [obʱidʒit banɔrdʒi] born 21 February 1961) is an American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Along with Esther Duflo, they are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize.