Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo, FBA (French: [dyflo]; born 25 October 1972) is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), founded in 2003 and supported by Community Jameel; holds the Poverty and Public Policy chair at the Collège de France since 2022; and is president of the Paris School of Economics since 2024. She shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Duflo is a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research associate, a board member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research's development economics program. Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, she wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times, published in April 2011 and November 2019, respectively. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Duflo is the seventh most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.