MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. (Photo by Bryce Vickmark.)
The Nobel Prize in Economics just awarded to MIT economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (along with Harvard colleague Michael Kremer) recognizes the transformational results of their antipoverty research and relief efforts. Their work exemplifies the power of creative and practical new approaches to the world’s biggest problems, backed with experimental rigor and analytical insight—all qualities found in much MIT research and the MIT education.
As MIT News wrote:
The work of Duflo and Banerjee, which has long been intertwined with Kremer’s, has been highly innovative in the area of development economics, emphasizing the use of field experiments in research in order to realize the benefits of laboratory-style randomized, controlled trials. Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.
Duflo and Banerjee also co-founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003, along with a third co-founder, Sendhil Mullainathan, now of the University of Chicago. J-PAL, a global network of antipoverty researchers that conducts field experiments, has now become a major center of research, facilitating work across the world.
J-PAL also examines which kinds of local interventions have the greatest impact on social problems, and works to implement those programs more broadly, in cooperation with governments and NGOs. Among J-PAL’s notable interventions are deworming programs that have been adopted widely…
Duflo, 46, is the second woman and the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel in economic sciences.
“We’re fortunate to see this kind of work being recognized,” Duflo told MIT News, noting that their work was “born at MIT and supported by MIT.” She called the work in this area a “collective effort” and said that “we could not have created a movement without hundreds of researchers and staff members.” The Nobel award, she said, also represented this collective enterprise, and was “larger than our work.”
MIT OpenCourseWare is proud to share with you these courses and resources by Professors Duflo and Banerjee.
- 14.73 The Challenge of World Poverty
This undergraduate course, featuring complete video lectures, is for those who are interested in the challenge posed by massive and persistent world poverty, and are hopeful that economists might have something useful to say about this challenge. The questions we will take up include: Is extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Why do some countries grow fast and others fall further behind? Does growth help the poor?… - 14.771 Development Economics: Microeconomic Issues and Policy Models
This graduate course, featuring complete lecture notes and taught with co-instructor Benjamin Olken, covers the productivity effects of health, private and social returns to education, education quality, education policy and market equilibrium, gender discrimination, public finance, decision making within families, firms and contracts, technology, labor and migration, land, and the markets for credit and savings. - Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Executive Training: Evaluating Social Programs 2009
This five-day program, led with co-instructor Rachel Glennerster, provides a thorough understanding of randomized evaluations and pragmatic step-by-step training for conducting one’s own evaluation. The OCW site features complete lecture videos (including one lecture by Nobel Prize co-winner Michael Kremer) and a set of case studies. - Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Executive Training: Evaluating Social Programs 2011
A complementary version of the J-PAL five-day program, with other case studies and exercises.
OCW also has two other courses by Professor Duflo:
- 14.74 Foundations of Policy Development
This undergraduate course explores the foundations of policy making in developing countries. The goal is to spell out various policy options and to quantify the trade-offs between them. We will study the different facets of human development: education, health, gender, the family, land relations, risk, informal and formal norms and institutions… - 14.11 Putting Social Sciences to the Test: Field Experiments in Economics
This undergraduate course, co-taught with Prof. David Autor, is about field (that is, ‘in situ’) and laboratory experiments in the social sciences – both what these experiments have taught and can teach us and how to conduct them.
And if all this great content on OCW leaves you wanting even more, there’s the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy, specifically focused on the methodologies and teaching of Professors Duflo and Banerjee.
First, CONGRATULATIONS to these 3 Nobelists. (By the way, this particular Nobel prize category is the youngest – i.e., the most-recently created Nobel award – and, formally, it goes also by another name). This MIT-created opportunity for the rest of us to read about and even study the actual courses created by the prize-winners is novel and outstanding: it permits us to link directly to their work, and in some depth rather than from afar. Other institutions should follow suit. So, MIT, and Open Courseware staff, congratulations ALSO TO YOU. (I say this as someone who actually has traveled especially from USA to the then Nobel HQ – Gamlastad, Stockholm – to research in situ at the Swedish Academy premises on the Nobel Literature awards, but at that time no formal university-level courses by any of the Laureates were being offered … How much I wish they had been!) … GREAT JOB, MIT!!!!
Congratulations. And thank you for making available these courses. It helps to have all materials in one site.
keep the good work up MIT!!!! Love it!!!!
it is really a piece of godsend that I can read and attend these noble-prize winners’ lessons. Nothing better than this!