Abhijit Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the Lab. He is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. With Esther Duflo, he has conducted randomized evaluations of remedial and computer assisted education in India. He has also assessed reforms of informal schools in tribal areas in India, working closely with a local NGO. Banerjee has brought theoretical expertise to development and behavioral economics, and also demonstrates proficiency in project evaluation.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2008, 22(2): 3-28.
This paper examines the three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class that are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and...
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2007, 21(1): 141-167.
Banerjee and Duflo examine the factors that distinguish individuals who have had some success at wealth creation (the middle class) from those who have not (the lower class). The authors find many similarities between the middle class and the poor. They...