Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003, he co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the Lab's Directors. Banerjee is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a winner of the Infosys Prize and a co-recipient of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his groundbreaking work in development economics research.
Banerjee is the author of many articles and five books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, and Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo. He is the editor of three more books and has directed two documentary films. Banerjee has served on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is the Chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel and the Global Advisory Board for Covid-19 Response of the government of West Bengal. He is also a Trustee of Save the Children USA.
Current role