Esther Duflo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Esther Duflo (2009)

Esther Caroline Duflo (born October 25, 1972 in Paris ) is a French - American economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where she holds the Abdul-Latif-Jameel Professorship for Poverty Reduction and Development Economics. Duflo's research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries , including household behavior, education policy, access to financial services, health policy and the evaluation of economic policy measures.

The Economist named her one of the eight most influential economists in the world in 2008. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2011. Her book Poor Economics was named Business Book of the Year 2011 by the Financial Times.

In 2019, together with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer , she received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics as the second woman after Elinor Ostrom (2009) and the youngest recipient to date .

Live and act

childhood and education

Esther Duflo is the daughter of the doctor Violaine Duflo and the mathematician Michel Duflo . She studied at the Grande école École normal supérieure (Paris) and graduated in 1994 with a maîtrise in history and economics. In 1995 she completed her main studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) with a DEA in economics. Duflo thereafter moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was there with the 1999 thesis Three essays in empirical Development Economics ( Three Essays in Empirical Development Economics Ph.D.).

Professional background

After receiving her Ph.D. in economics, Duflo became Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, before being promoted to Associate Professor in 2002 and full Professor of Economics in 2004. From 2001 to 2002 Duflo also taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University . In 2003 Duflo founded the Poverty Action Lab at MIT together with Sendhil Mullainathan and Abhijit Banerjee , of which Duflo became director in 2004. The Poverty Action Lab is a research network devoted to the development of new methods of poverty reduction and the assessment of economic policy measures through randomized controlled field experiments and was renamed the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab in 2005. In 2015, more than 100 scientists worked there.

In 2005 Duflo received the newly created Abdul Latif Jameel Professorship for Poverty Reduction and Development Economics at MIT. In addition to her teaching and research work, she has worked as an editor for the economic journals Annual Review of Economics and The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics since 2007 , where she is co-founder of the latter publication. Previously, Duflo was editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics (2002–2007), the Journal of Development Economics (2004–2006), the Journal of Economic Perspectives (2004–2007) and the Journal of the European Economic Association (2002–2006 ) active.

In 2012, then-US President Barack Obama appointed her to the Presidential Advisory Council on Global Development. Their job was to advise the US President and senior members of the government. Left-wing critics accuse her of advocating disciplining the poor instead of social change. The macroeconomic and politico-structural causes of poverty are not the subject of her analysis and she does not want any redistribution of social resources in favor of the poor.

In 2019 she was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics .

research

According to the economic publications database IDEAS , Duflo is clearly one of the top 1% economists in the overall ranking (110th place, as of October 2015). Duflo is also among the top 5% of the economists recorded in the database under criteria such as “number of publications” or “number of citations”. Duflos' most cited article is How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates (2002) and was co- authored with Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan . In this article, Bertrand, Duflo, and Mullainathan analyze the difference-in-differences estimation (DIDE) , a causal relationship estimation method , and conclude that the DvD approach, in its conventional use , significantly increases the standard error of the estimated effect of the intervention under study underrated. To counter the autocorrelation problem, Bertrand, Duflo and Mullainathan finally propose three solutions: a coincidence of the data in periods before and after the procedure, the use of a special covariance matrix or an adaptation of the randomization interference test methods.

Duflo has significantly developed random field experiments for assessing political measures, in which people are randomly divided into groups and exposed to slightly different conditions in order to identify which policies have which consequences.

Duflos Institute conducted studies on microcredit in several countries and found that the impact was much less than often thought. The scientist advocates requesting evidence of the success of certain measures in development aid before they are implemented on a large scale.

honors and awards

Private life

Esther Duflo is a French citizen and has been a US citizen since 2012 . She has been married to Abhijit Banerjee , who is also a professor of economics and who has collaborated with Duflo on several of her research projects , since 2015 ; they have two children together.

Publications (selection)

  • with Rema Hanna: Monitoring works. Getting teachers to come to school. CEPR, London 2006.
  • with Abhijit Banerjee: Aging and death under a dollar a day. NBER, Cambridge, Mass. 2007.
  • with Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan: How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates , Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 119, 2004, pp. 249-275
  • Giving credit where it is due. In: The journal of economic perspectives. A journal of the AEA. Volume 24 (2010), ISSN  0895-3309 , pp. 61-80.
  • Requiescat in pace? The consequences of high-priced funerals in South Africa. In: David A. Wise (Ed.): Explorations in the economics of aging. University Press, Chicago, Ill. 2011, ISBN 978-0-226-90337-8 , pp. 351-373.
  • with Abhijit Banerjee: Poor Economics. A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-58648-798-0 .
  • Is decentralized iron fortification a feasible option to fight anemia among the poorest? In: David A. Wise (Ed.): Explorations in the economics of aging . University Press, Chicago, Ill. 2011, ISBN 978-0-226-90337-8 , pp. 317-344.
  • Interview of the time with Banerjee and Duflo, 2011
  • with Abhijit Banerjee : Poor Economics. Barefoot Hedge-Fund Managers, DIY Doctors and the Surprising Truth about Life on Less than 1 $ a Day . Penguin Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-0-7181-9366-9 .
  • Fight against poverty . Translated from the French by Andrea Hemminger. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2013. ISBN 978-3-518-29664-6 .
  • with Abhijit Banerjee: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems , Juggernaut Books, November 12, 2019. Topics: Insights from current economic research on broad topics such as migration, social welfare, environmental protection, and trade. A short part also includes a plea for an affordable small unconditional basic income (Universal Ultra Basic Income - UUBI) for emerging and developing countries using India as an example. ISBN 978-0-241-30689-5 .
    • German edition: Good economy for tough times. Six survival questions and how we can solve them better , Penguin Verlag, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-328-60114-2 .

Web links

Commons : Esther Duflo  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MIT Economics: Esther Duflo. Retrieved January 5, 2020 .
  2. ↑ International bright young things. In: The Economist. December 30, 2008.
  3. ↑ Rana Foroohar: The 2011 Time 100. Esther Duflo. In: Time. April 21, 2011, accessed October 17, 2012 .
  4. ↑ Christine Mattauch: How poverty can be abolished. In: Zeit-Online. August 30, 2012. Retrieved October 17, 2012 .
  5. ↑ a b Esther Duflo . nobelprize.org. Retrieved October 14, 2019.
  6. ↑ povertyactionlab.org
  7. ↑ a b c Pia Ratzesberger: 'I'm not easy to shock.' Esther Duflo is one of the most influential economists and wants to fight global poverty - her own prosperity has always weighed on her. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , No. 244, October 23, 2015, p. 24.
  8. ^ President Obama announces intent to appoint Esther Duflo to Global Development Council. MIT development economist nominated for presidential policy council. In: MIT news. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 3, 2013, accessed January 5, 2013 .
  9. ↑ Gerhard Klas: The fight against poverty? In: young world. 22. July 2013.
  10. ↑ Overall ranking of the economic publications database IDEAS (English)
  11. ↑ Author profile of Esther Duflo on IDEAS (English)
  12. ↑ Marianne Bertrand, Esther Duflo, Sendhil Mullainathan (2004): Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates? (English)
  13. ↑ Who will be the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics? In: FAZ.net . October 5, 2018, archived from the original on October 6, 2018 ; accessed on October 14, 2019 .
  14. ^ Prix ​​du meilleur jeune économiste 2010. lecercledeseconomistes.fr, May 18, 2010, accessed on December 9, 2015 (French).
  15. ^ Social Science Research Council: The Albert O. Hirschman Prize, 2014. Accessed April 30, 2014.
  16. ^ Esther Duflo, Premio Princesa de Asturias de Ciencias Sociales ; accessed on May 13, 2015.
  17. ↑ ASK Social Science Award for Esther Duflo ; accessed on September 16, 2016.
  18. ↑ Soutik Biswas: The Nobel couple fighting poverty cliches . October 15, 2019 ( bbc.com [accessed November 30, 2019]).
  19. ↑ John Gapper: Lunch with the FT: Esther Duflo. In: The Financial Times. March 17, 2011.
  20. ↑ Excerpt: Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo on Which Kind of UBI Could Work in India (English), The Wire (India), 2019
  21. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: Full-grown problems. Retrieved August 7, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Duflo, Esther
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Duflo, Esther Caroline (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French economist
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris