Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee jointly won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday.
Banerjee is joined by France’s Esther Duflo and American Michael Kremer in the winners’ list.
“The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty,” he Nobel committee said in a statement.
“In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research,” it added.
Abhijeet Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University.
He received his PhD from Harvard in 1988.
Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Banerjee, along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003.
The Nobel Laureate also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
Banerjee is the second Indian to be awarded Nobel Prize in economics after Amartya Sen, who won the coveted award in 1998.
He is the 12th Indian to win the Nobel Prize.
The other winners are Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1923), CV Raman (Physics, 1930), Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979), Amartya Sen (Economic Sciences, 1988), Kailash Satyarthi (Peace, 2014), Har Gobind Khorana (Physiology or Medicine, 1968), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983), and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (2009, Chemistry)
