Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian economist, born in Kolkata. His father, Dipak Banerjee, Professor and Head of Department of Economics, Presidency College, Calcutta and mother, Nirmala Banerjee, Professor of Economics, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, are renowned names in the field of economics.
He attended South Point School, and enrolled to Presidency College, Calcutta, where he graduated with a B.Sc degree in Economics in 1981. He went on to complete his M.A. in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1983. He then studied at the Harvard University and obtained a Ph.D. in Economics in 1988. The subject of his doctoral thesis is "Essays in Information Economics".
He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining MIT, he taught at Harvard and Princeton.
He is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan) and a Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems, and a Member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. He is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences (Economics).
His book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), co-authored with Esther Duflo reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using a evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Banerjee has over 40 papers / essays published on his work that focuses on development economics. Together with Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, John List and Sendhil Mullainathan, he has proposed 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.
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