Esther Duflo : 2010

E sther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. Esther has focused on topics that many economists think probably are central to understanding the differences in welfare between the high-income and low-income countries of the world: not only education, credit, food, and health, but also more nebulous concepts like social institutions and leadership. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the developing world that seeks to address these questions by integrating large-scale field experiments with economic theory to yield important insights for development policy and our understanding of behavior and institutions in developing countries. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the exciting renaissance of development economics over the past decade. Esther was born in France, and received her B.A. in history and economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1994 and her Masters in Economics from DELTA in 1995. She did her Ph.D. in Economics at MIT, completing her doctorate in 1999. She roiled the economics establishment from the start of her career, with MIT breaking standard practice to offer an assistant professorship to one of its own students. In conversations with her at that time, I had to recognize that my efforts to recruit her to Yale instead were doomed to failure and agree with her reasoning that the environment that she had available to her at MIT was perhaps uniquely well-suited to her vision of the work she planned to do as an economist. She decided to stay at MIT as an Assistant Professor, and has remained there ever since. This is just one of the times that her choice to ignore conventional wisdom worked out pretty well. Esther Duflo: 2010 John Bates Clark Medalist