Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (born 21 February 1961) is an Indian-born American economist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2019 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with his wife, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. He co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which tests anti-poverty programmes with field experiments.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee |
| Born | 21 February 1961, Bombay (now Mumbai), India |
| Age | 65 |
| Field | Development economics |
| Position | Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, MIT |
| Education | Presidency College, Calcutta (B.Sc.); Jawaharlal Nehru University (M.A.); Harvard University (Ph.D. 1988) |
| Spouse | Arundhati Tuli (div.); Esther Duflo (m. 2015) |
| Honour | Nobel Prize in Economics (2019) |
Early Life
Banerjee grew up in Kolkata, where both his parents taught economics: his father, Dipak Banerjee, at Presidency College and his mother, Nirmala, at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. He studied at South Point School and Presidency College and took a master’s degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where in 1983 he spent about ten days in Tihar Jail after a student protest. He earned his doctorate at Harvard.
Career
He taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining MIT in 1993. His early work was theoretical, on subjects such as herd behaviour and credit markets.
In 2003 he founded J-PAL with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. Borrowing from medicine, its researchers compare groups that receive a programme with similar groups that do not. Studies in India found, for example, that hiring local tutors for children who had fallen behind raised test scores, and that giving a small bag of lentils greatly increased immunisation rates. More than five million Indian children benefited from remedial teaching programmes that grew out of this work.
He, Duflo and Kremer received the prize in October 2019. Banerjee collected it in Stockholm wearing a dhoti and bandhgala.
He advised the Congress party on its proposed minimum income scheme before the 2019 election and chaired West Bengal’s advisory board during the pandemic. Like Amartya Sen, he has been a critic of some Indian government economic policies, including demonetisation.
Books
Personal Life
Banerjee has two children with Duflo. A son from his first marriage died in 2016. He is a keen cook.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Abhijit Banerjee born?
Abhijit Banerjee was born on 21 February 1961 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India and is 65 years old.
Featured image: Abhijit Banerjee at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. Photo by Sriya Sarkar, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
