-The Indian Express Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer introduced a paradigm shift in approach to alleviating poverty. The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2019 has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. The approach, popularly known as Randomised Control Trial (RCT), has been the buzzword among development economists for almost two decades. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have used this technique (inspired...

-Ideas for India Commenting on the concept of evidence-based policy, Jean Drèze argues that the relation between evidence and policy needs further thought. Based on his involvement with social policy in India, he believes that while economists can contribute to more informed policy discussions and public debates they ought to be cautious in offering advice on policy design. Once upon a time, ‘evidence’ was widely confused with randomised controlled trials (RCTs). The...

-Livemint.com Economist Esther Duflo on demonetisation impact, role of randomized control trials in policymaking, low priority assigned to health and education in India New Delhi: India’s demonetisation of high-value currency notes is a dramatic example of a policy announcement made without any serious thought given to implementation, said Esther Duflo, one of the leading development economists of the world and a professor at the department of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of...

-The Hindu We could hold people accountable to a reasonable standard of expectation and that's the first step, says economist Esther Duflo In 2003, French-American economist Esther Duflo co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan. In just over ten years, JPAL has carried out 568 field experiments - or Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) - in 56 countries,...