Sustainable development and economics speaker Abhijit Banerjee is the co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics along with his wife, Michael Kremer, and Esther Duflo. He obtained his education at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Moreover, he studied to get his Ph.D. at Harvard University.  At the moment, Abhijit works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. He co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Sendhil Mullainathan and Esther Duflo in 2003. Today, he continues to serve as one of the lab’s directors.

Banerjee used to be the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development’s president. He also did some research for NBER, CEPR, the Kiel Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. Moreover, Abhijit has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and received the Infosys Prize.

Among his publications are many articles and four books, one of which being Poor Economics. This book won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Speaker Abhijit Banerjee’s most recent book, Good Economics for Hard Times, describes how economics can assist us in tackling the social and political difficulties of our time. He co-wrote the book with Esther Duflo. Furthermore, he has edited three other books and directed two documentaries. Abhijit Banerjee was also a member of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, convened by the United Nations Secretary-General.

He and his colleagues are attempting to determine the effectiveness of actions to enhance people’s quality of life. They do this through the use of randomized controlled trials, which are analogous to clinical trials in the medical field. For instance, even though polio immunization is widely available in India, parents fail to get their children vaccinated. Banerjee conducted an experiment along with Esther Duflo. They would distribute bags of pulses to whoever got their children vaccinated. The rate of immunization began to rise shortly after starting to give these pulses away. Moreover, they did another experiment where they discovered that kids with special needs learned more at school when supported by teaching assistants.