Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Banerjee
Banerjee at the 2011 FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award
Born	February 1961 (age 55) Kolkata, India
Nationality	Indian
Institution	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Field	Development economics
Alma mater	Harvard University Jawaharlal Nehru University Presidency College, Calcutta
Influences	Esther Duflo
Influenced	Esther Duflo

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (Bengali: অভিজিৎ বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়; born 1961) is an Indian economist. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[1] Banerjee is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan), a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, and a member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow at the Econometric Society. He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. Together with Esther Duflo, he is the co-author of Poor Economics.

Early life

Banerjee was born in Kolkata, India to Nirmala Banerjee, professor of economics, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Dipak Banerjee, professor and head of department of economics, Presidency College, Calcutta.

He attended South Point School and Presidency College, Calcutta, where he completed his B.S. degree in economics in 1981. Later, he completed his M.A. in economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1983. Later he went on to obtain a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 1988. The subject of his doctoral thesis is "Essays in Information Economics".

Career

Banerjee 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.

His work 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.^[2] He also was honoured with the Infosys Prize 2009 in the social sciences category of economics. He is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of social sciences (economics).^[3]

In 2013, he was named by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, to a panel of experts tasked with updating the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 (their expiration date).^[4]

Publications

Books

• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (with Esther Duflo), PublicAffairs, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61039-040-8
• "Making Aid Work, The MIT Press, A Boston Review Book, 2007. ISBN 978-0-262-02615-4

Papers, other publications and unpublished works

Since 2010

• The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation

June 2010 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan

• Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

May 2010 Abhijit Banerjee, Vivi Alatas, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken, and Julia Tobias

• The Shape of Temptation: Implications for the Economic Lives of the Poor

April 2010 Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan

• Giving Credit Where it is Due

March 2010 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

2000 to 2009

• Improving Health Care Delivery in India

November 2009 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

• Marry for What? Caste and Selection in Modern India

2009 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, and Jeanne Lafortune

• The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan May 2009

• Parochial Politics: Ethnic Preferences and Politician Corruption

Abhijit Banerjee and Rohini Pande 2009

• Corruption

Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, and Sendhil Mullainathan February 2009

• Why Does Missallocation Persist?

Abhijit Banerjee and Benjamin Moll February 2009

• A Capitalist Knows Who To Call

A. Banerjee 2008, M. Kinsley, Creative Capitalism: A Conversation with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Other Economic Leaders, pp. 161–165.

• Why fighting poverty is hard

September 2008 Abhijit Banerjee

• Big Answers for Big Questions: The Presumption of Growth Policy

Abhijit Banerjee September 2008

• The Experimental Approach to Development Economics

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo September 2008

• Pitfalls of Participatory Programs:Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Stuti Khemani August 2008

• Mandated Empowerment: Handing Antipoverty Policy Back to the Poor?

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo June 2008

• Why Has Unemployment Risen in the New South Africa

Abhijit Banerjee, Sebastian Galiani, Jim Levinsohn, Zoe McLaren, and Ingrid Woolard June 2008

• Making Aid Work

Abhijit Banerjee and Ruimin He May 2008

• Do Firms Want to Borrow More? Testing Creit Constraints Using a Directed Lending Program

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo May 2008

• Improving Immunization Coverage in Rural India: A Clustered Randomized Controlled Evaluation of Immunization Campaigns with and without Incentives

May 2010 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Dhruva Kothari

• Limited Attention and Income Distribution

Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainthan January 2008

• Aging and Death under a Dollar a Day

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo December 2007

• What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes Around the World?

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo December 2007

• Public Action for Public Goods

A. Banerjee, L. Iyer, and R. Somanathan September 2006, Handbook of Development Economics, Vo. 4

• The Economic Lives of the Poor

A. Banerjee and E. Duflo April 2006, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vo. 21(1), pp. 141–167

• Updated Table (17 March 2008) for Economic Lives of the Poor and What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes Around the World?

with Esther Duflo

• Comment on Buiter-Patel

April 2006, India Policy Forum, Vo. 2

• The Paradox of Indian Growth: A comment on Kochar, et al.

A. Banerjee July 2006, Journal of Monetary Economics, Vo. 53(5), pp. 1021–1026

• The Political Economy of Public Goods: Some Evidence from India

A. Banerjee and R. Somanathan April 2006

• Growth Theory through the Lens of Development Economics

A. Banerjee and E. Duflo December 2005, Published: Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 1a. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 473–552

• Remedying Education Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India

A. Banerjee, S. Cole, E. Duflo, and L. Linden December 2005, NBER Working paper 11904 Addressing Absence A. Banerjee and E. Duflo May 2005, Published: Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vo. 20 (1), pp. 117–132

• Bank Financing in India

A. Banerjee, S. Cole, and E. Duflo 2005, India’s and China’s Recent Experience with Reform and Growth, Wanda Tseng, and David Cowen, eds.

• Bank Financing in India

A. Banerjee, S. Cole and E. Duflo 2005, India’s and China’s Recent Experience with Reform and Growth, Wanda Tseng, and David Cowen, eds.

• Inequality and Investment

A. Banerjee December 2004

• Notes Toward a Theory of Industrialization in the Developing World

A. Banerjee October 2004, Marjit, S. and N. Banerjee (Eds.) Development, Displacement and Disparity: India in the Last Quarter of the Century, pp. 139–159

• History, Social Divisions and Public Goods in Rural India

A. Banerjee, L. Iyer, and R. Somanathan 2004

• History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India

A. Banerjee and L. Iyer October 2004

• What do banks (not) do

A. Banerjee and E. Duflo September 2004

• Do Firms Want to Borrow More? Testing Credit Constraints Using a Directed Lending Program

A. Banerjee and E. Duflo August 2004

• Banking Reform in India

A. Banerjee, S. Cole, and E. Duflo June 2004

• Bank Financing in India

A. Banerjee, S. Cole, and E. Duflo October 2003

• Top Indian Incomes, 1956–2000

A. Banerjee and T. Piketty June 2003

• Strategy For Economics Reform in West Bengal

A. Banerjee, P. Bardhan, K. Basu, M. Ghatak, et al. October 2002, Economic and Political Weekly of India, 12 October 2002

• The Uses of Economic Theory: Against a Purely Positive Interpretation of Theoretical Results

A. Banerjee May 2002 A Corporate Balance-Sheet Approach to Currency Crises P. Aghion, P. Bacchetta, and A. Banerjee November 2001

• Caste, Community and Collective Action: The Political Economy of Public Good Provision in India

A. Banerjee and R. Somanathan September 2001

Before 2000

• Herd Behavior and the Reward for Originality

A. Banerjee Unpublished Mimeo, May 1989

• On Frequent Flyer Programs and other Loyalty-Inducing Economic Arrangements

A. Banerjee and L. Summers Harvard University Discussion Paper, 1337, September 1987

References

1. "Our focus is to enrol people suffering from lack of identity: Nandan Nilekani". The Times of India. 6 July 2010.
2. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 17 May 2011.
3. Infosys Prize 2009 – Social Sciences – Economics
4. "Ban names high-level panel to map out 'bold' vision for future global development efforts". Retrieved 6 November 2013.

External links and references

• Abhijit Banerjee's Home Page
• MIT Short Bio
• Poverty Action Lab
• New York Times article about work
• Innovations for Poverty Action
• Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty
• Roberts, Russ (11 July 2011). "Banerjee on Poverty and Poor Economics". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.