Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo is a French economist, CoFounder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab , and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development , and is Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Researchs development economics program.

Duflo was born in 1972 in Paris. Her father is a math professor and her mother, a doctor. At eight, she decided to become a historian. After studying in Lyce HenriIVs classes prparatoires BL, Duflo entered her undergraduate studies at cole Normale Suprieure in Paris to study history. And in her second year at university she questioned her future as a professor, and began considering a career in the civil service, or politics. It was in this mood that she spent ten months in Moscow, starting in 1993. She taught French, and worked on a history thesis that told how, in the Soviet Union, they had used the big construction sites, like the Stalingrad tractor factory, for propaganda, and how propaganda requirements changed the actual shape of the projects. In Moscow, she also worked as a research assistant for a French economist then connected to the Bank of Russia, and, separately, for Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist then at Harvard, who was advising the Minister of Finance. These rese

Source: Wikipedia