The renowned Indian American economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee shared the 2019 Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. He was born in Mumbai on 21st February, 1961. His mother, Nirmala Banerjee was a professor of Economics at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata and his father, Dipak Banerjee was a professor and head of the department of economics at Presidency College, Kolkata. He has done his schooling from South Point School, Kolkata. He has done B.A. in Economics from Presidency College, Kolkata, in 1981. After completion of his bachelor degree he took his admission in Jawaharlal Nehru University, in Delhi and successfully completed his M.A. in Economics in 1983. Later he went on to Harvard University in 1988 to obtain Ph.D. in Economics and the subject of his thesis was " Essays in Information Economics". At present he is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earlier he had taught at Harvard University and Princeton University. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2004. He was honored with the Infosys Prize 2009 in the social sciences category of economics and he also received the inaugural Infosys Prize in the same. He shared the Gerald Loeb Award Honorable Mention for Business book with co-author Esther Duflo for their book "Poor Economics" in 2012. This book is very helpful and those who don't love economics will surely love to read this book as it's written in a very lucid manner. 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. He was awarded the Bernhard-Harms-Prize from the Kiel Institute for the world Economy in 2014. Recently in 2019 he delivered Export Import Bank of India's 34th Commencement Day Annual lecture on Redesigning Social Policy. He is also a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab along with his wife, economist Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo are the sixth married couple who jointly awarded the noble prize.
