Esther Duflo became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, following Elinor Ostrom’s 2009 award.
Duflo received the prize in 2019 and shared it with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. Their work developed an experimental approach to global poverty, using randomized trials to evaluate interventions in education, health, and other areas.
Duflo’s research often focuses on practical policy questions: whether teachers attend school, how children learn, how health services are used, and which incentives produce measurable results. Breaking large problems into smaller questions makes the results easier to test and apply.
The wording “second woman” matters because Ostrom was the first female economics laureate. Claudia Goldin later became the third woman, receiving the 2023 prize for research on women’s labor-market outcomes.