Abhijit
Banerjee
Introduction- Prof. Abhijit
Vinayak Banerjee was born on 21st February 1961 at Mumbai, India. Prof.
Banerjee completed his schooling from South Point High School at Calcutta and
also completed his B.Sc. in economics at the University of Calcutta in 1981,
M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1983 and awarded Ph.D. in 1988 from
Harvard University, the title of his doctoral thesis was ‘Essays in Information
Economics’. Both his parents was also served as Professors of
economics where his father at Presidency College, Calcutta and mother at Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Prof. Banerjee’s main
field of interests was on the areas such as economic development, information
theory, theory of income distribution, macroeconomics etc.
Academic Positions-
1988-1992:-
Assistant Professor of Economics, Princeton University
1991
(Fall):- Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University
1992-1993:-
Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University
1993-1994:-
Pentti J.K. Kouri Career Development Associate Professor of Economics, M.I.T.
1994-1996:-
Associate Professor of Economics, M.I.T.
1996-2003:-
Professor of Economics, M.I.T.
2003:-
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, M.I.T.
2003:-
Director, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, M.I.T.
2018-2019:-
Visiting Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics
Fellowships
and Honors- Banerjee has received several
fellowships and honorary awards from different institutions around the world.
Some of the given below:
· Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics
in memory of Alfred Nobel, 2019
· Member,
National Academy of Sciences, 2020
· Bernhard
Harms Prize (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), 2014
· The
Albert O. Hirschman Prize (The Social Science Research Council), 2014
· Infosys
Award in Social Sciences, 2009
· BBVA
Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Development Cooperation, 2009
· Member,
Council of the Econometric Society, 2004-
· American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow, 2004-
Work-
v Banerjee, Duflo,
and Kremer, often working with each other, focused on relatively small and
specific problems that contributed to poverty and identified the best solutions
through carefully designed field experiments, which they conducted in several
low- and middle-income countries over the course of more than two decades. They
also explored methods for generalizing the results of particular experiments to
larger populations, different geographic regions, and
different implementing authorities (e.g., nongovernmental
organizations [NGOs] and local or national governments), among other
variables. Their fieldwork led to successful public policy recommendations and
transformed the field of development economics, where their approach and
methods became standard.
v Banerjee, Duflo, and
Kremer applied their experimental approach in many areas,
including education, health and medicine access to credit
and the adoption of new technologies. Building on the results of field
experiments conducted in the mid-1990s by Kremer and his colleagues, which had
shown that poor learning (as measured by average test scores) among
school-children in western Kenya was not caused by scarcity of textbooks or
even by hunger (many students went to school without breakfast), Banerjee
and Duflo tested the hypothesis that learning could be improved by
implementing remedial tutoring and computer-assisted learning
programs to address the needs of weaker students.
v Working with large
student populations in two Indian cities over a two-year period, they found
that such programs had substantial positive effects in the short and medium
term, leading them to conclude that a major cause of poor learning in
low-income countries was that teaching methods were not properly adapted to
students’ needs.
v In later experimental research in Kenya, Duflo
and Kremer determined that decreasing the size of classes taught by permanently
employed teachers did not significantly improve learning but that putting
teachers on short-term contracts, which were renewed only if the teacher
achieved good results, did have beneficial effects. They also showed that
tracking (dividing students into groups based on prior achievement) and
incentives to combat teacher absenteeism, a significant problem in low-income
countries, also positively affected learning. The latter finding was further
supported in studies by Banerjee and Duflo in India.
v In the area of health
and medicine, Banerjee and Duflo tested the hypothesis that introducing mobile
clinics would significantly boost child-vaccination rates (the percentage
of children who were fully immunized) in India—where, as in other low-income
countries, high rates of health-worker absenteeism and poor service quality at
stationary health centres, among other factors, had long discouraged the use of
preventive medicines by poor families. They found that vaccination rates in
villages that had been randomly selected to receive visits by mobile clinics
were three times greater than rates in villages that had not been selected and
that vaccination rates increased by more than six times if families were given
a bag of lentils with each immunization.
v
Banerjee
and Duflo also used field experiments in the Indian city of Hyderabad to
test the effectiveness of microcredit loan programs in promoting economic
growth and development. The somewhat unexpected results indicated that
such programs did not significantly increase small-business investment or
profitability and did not improve other indicators of economic growth and
development such as per capita consumption, health, and children’s
education.
Later
studies of several low- and middle-income countries by other researchers
confirmed those results.
v
Work
by Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer directly and indirectly influenced national and
international policy making in beneficial ways. Banerjee and Duflo’s studies of
remedial tutoring and computer-assisted learning in India, for example, led to
large-scale programs that affected more than five million Indian
schoolchildren. According to J-PAL, programs that
were implemented following studies by researchers associated with the
centre, including Kremer, have reached more than 400 million people. The
laureates’ experimental approach also inspired both public and private
organizations to systematically evaluate their anti-poverty programs, sometimes
on the basis of their own fieldwork, and to drop those that proved to be
ineffective.
Contribution-
v Abhijit Banerjee with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for helping to develop an innovative experimental approach to allevating global poverty.
v
J-PAL- The Poverty
Action Lab was founded in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) by professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Sendhil Mullainathan,
with the goal of transforming how the world approaches the challenges of global
poverty. In 2005 the lab was named in honor of Abdul Latif Jameel, the father
of MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel and founder of the Abdul Latif
Jameel company.
J-PAL
translates research into action, promoting a culture of evidence-informed
policymaking around the world. Our policy analysis and outreach helps
governments, NGOs, donors, and the private sector apply evidence from
randomized evaluations to their work, and contributes to public discourse
around some of the most pressing questions in social policy and international
development.
J-PAL also builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, and high-level decision-makers to share frameworks for applying global evidence to local contexts, and to support use of evidence to drive policy reform. This includes providing funding, technical assistance, and embedded staff to help shape programs and policies that deliver results.
Publications: He
published more than 300 documents and his h-index counted 87 according the Google Scholar Citations counts. Some
of the books and documentaries are given below.
Books-
Ø
2019
Good Economics for Hard Times (with
Esther Duflo), New York: Public Affairs.
Ø
2019
What the Economy Needs Now
(co-edited with Gita Gopinath, Raghuram Rajan, and Mihir S. Sharma), Delhi:
Juggernaut Books.
Ø
2017
Handbook of Field Experiments, Vol. 1 and 2, (with Esther Duflo), North–Holland
(an imprint of Elsevier).
Ø
2011
Poor Economics, (with Esther Duflo),
New York: PublicAffairs.
Ø
2007
Making Aid Work, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ø
2006
Understanding Poverty (co-edited with Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee),
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Ø
2005
Volatility and Growth (with Philippe Aghion), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Documentaries
Ø
2019
The Magnificent Journey: Times and Tales of Democracy (co-directed with Ranu
Ghosh).
Ø
2006
The Name of the Disease (co-directed with Arundhati Tuli Banerjee, Bappa Sen,
Konkona Sen Sharma, and Sumit Ghosh). Cambridge, MA: I-mage Productions.
Professional
services- Some of the given below:
Trustee, Save the Children, 2016 –
Member, United Nations High-level
Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, 2012 – 2013
Member, Advanced Market Commitment
Working Group, Center for Global Development, 2003-2006
Research Fellow at the Center for
Economics and Policy Research, 2006 –
Member, Quality of Learning
Outcomes Advisory Panel, Hewlett Foundation, 2006 – Research Associate,
National Bureau of Economic Research, 2006-
Member of Board of Editors, American
Economic Review, 2005-2009
References-
• https://www.povertyactionlab.org/
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