Nobel Prize in Economics won by Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer for fighting poverty - live updates
Esther Duflo becomes second woman to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer also recognised for their research alleviating poverty
- Duflo: Women in economics need more respect
- Breaking: Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer win
- Duflo is second female winner, and youngest ever
- Award recognises work on global poverty
- Introduction: Nobel prize for economics being awarded today
3.01pm BST
Time for a recap, as the "Nobel season" comes to an end.
Three economists have won the biggest prize in economics for their work into the causes of poverty, including only the second-ever female winner.
The Laureates' research findings - and those of the researchers following in their footsteps - have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools.
Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries.
2019 Economic Sciences Laureate Esther Duflo, born in 1972, is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences.#NobelFacts #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/0Ek8E7kLRh
We are a time when we are starting to realise in the profession that the way we conduct each other privately and publicly, is not conducive all the time to a very good environment for women.
Showing that it is possible for a women to succeed, and to be recognised for success, I hope will inspire many many other women to continue working, and many many other men to give them the respect they deserve, like every single human being.
2.57pm BST
Social media is abuzz with congratulations for today's trio, from fellow academics.
Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University, has hailed the creativity and impact of their work.
So thrilled by the Nobel Prize news this morning. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer deserve congratulations for the creativity of their research and the high impact. Two of them-Abhijit and Esther-won the Infosys Prize earlier.
I am so excited to wake up to the news that this year's @NobelPrize went to extraordinary developmental economists making the world better through experiments. And Esther Duflo is particularly inspiring. Congratulations all! https://t.co/ftmL2UIthM
Congratulations to this year's Nobel Prize winners in Economics Abhijit Banerjee, Ester Duflo and Michael Kremer! Thank you for you work and your committment to mentoring a generation of development economists. https://t.co/Ir1tFoYjmN
Huge congratulations & respect for Esther Duflo. When I was helping on gender policy at the State Dept, we often looked to her research. Just one of many ways her research has shaped policy.https://t.co/7UVgfaGPUl https://t.co/9Efvai9Cbx
2.40pm BST
Here's my colleague Philip Inman on today's award:
Related: Economics Nobel prize won by academics for tackling poverty
2.17pm BST
The AFP have written a profile of Esther Duflo. Here's a flavour:
Esther Duflo, one of three people awarded the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday, is a high-profile academic feted in the United States and her home country France for her hands-on approach to studying how people can escape the poverty trap.
The 46-year-old professor, the youngest ever winner of the economics prize and only the second woman to gain the accolade, had been widely tipped since she picked up the prestigious John Bates Clark medal in 2010 which is often a first step to the Nobel award.
2.11pm BST
French economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century examines the causes of inequality, has tweeted his congratulations:
Congratulations to Abhijit, Esther and Mike! Well deserved! https://t.co/jubcUHEBAb
1.55pm BST
Shobhini Mukerji of the South Asia branch of the Poverty Action Lab, in New Delhi (where Banerjee and Duflo conducted their work on poverty reduction) has welcomed the news.
Mukerji says (via AFP).
"This is huge for us.... India is where the seeds were sown for their research."
1.53pm BST
Abhijit Banerjee's mother, Nirmala is also an economist -- a former professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
"He has been trying to get economics away from the theoretical part, but using theory to understand the world as it is.
The way it works, the way poverty is, the way people handle poverty."
"I haven't spoken to my son (since the award was announced) but I did speak to him last night. He did not mention this then. I will tell him off... he should have told me about it".
1.25pm BST
The randomised control trials (RCTs) at the heart of Duflo, Banerjee and Kramer's work aren't without critics.
Splitting people randomly into groups is meant to allow researchers to change one variable (free healthcare, better funded schools, mosquito nets) and see the effect.
"It is good that the contribution of development economics has been recognised. However, it is important to note that experimental methods such [randomised controlled trials] RCTs and natural experiments, tend to estimate abstract efficacy instead of actual efficacy.
The difference between these two types of efficacy arises due to a false assumption that a 'gold standard' of perfect identification is possible from the evidence obtained from the experiment. The evidence is then taken at face-value without due regard to the possibility of conceptual or ethical concerns."
1.08pm BST
Back in 2011, Madeleine Bunting wrote about the importance of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's work:
Duflo and Banerjee are most well known for their work through the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-Pal, which has pioneered the use of randomised controlled trials to find out what works in development. In less than a decade, they have worked with local partners in a wide range of countries on nearly 240 trials. As Duflo put it in a Ted lecture, much of development policy has until now been on a par with medieval medicine - doing things based on habit, a hunch or misplaced belief - and she once likened development interventions as rather like using leeches. She maintains that she can take the "guesswork out of policy making".
Some don't like the ethics of handing out bednets in one village and not the next, but Duflo and Banerjee's argument is that we need to know what works and why, rather than the scattergun assumptions we have relied on up to now. Should the bednets be free or sold for a small fee? They talk of development as an "accumulation of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested and judiciously implemented".
Related: Duflo and Banerjee take the guesswork out of policies that help the poor | Madeleine Bunting
12.50pm BST
Back in 2012, Esther Duflo had 'Lunch with the Financial Times' - a popular interview format which often elicits more insights than a standard face-to-face.
The FT's John Gapper wrote:
Duflo, raised in Paris, is one of three children whose mother, Violaine, instilled in them a sense of social justice. "Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war. She used to travel to countries that had been through war and she would come back and show us slides to make us aware."
She studied history with economics at the Ecole Normale Supi(C)rieure in Paris, an elite institution that turns out French academics and politicians, and the turning point came in her fourth year, spent in Russia.
Despite cultural barriers, several studies have indicated that putting women in charge of decision-making, for example on village councils in India, makes it more likely that children will be well-fed and better educated. So would poverty be eradicated if it were a woman's world?
Typically, Duflo has a hard-headed view - it might help but it wouldn't be enough by itself. "It is codified that women in Africa are in charge of getting food on the table so you get better outcomes for children when resources are transferred to women. But you cannot rely on women's empowerment to make us all rich and healthy.
My child is going to be American.....
And he [Banerjee] doesn't speak French, so I don't think he would like to go to France."
12.36pm BST
12.33pm BST
Professor Costas Milas of Liverpool University tells me that all three winners are very highly regarded in their field:
Based on data from 56,942 authors, RePEc (Research Papers in Economics; a central index of economics research available here) places all 3 Nobel Prize Winners in the top 1" in terms of the popularity of their research work.
More specifically, in terms of Research Work by Number of Citations, Weighted by Recursive Impact Factors and Discounted by Citation Age, Esther Duflo is ranked 3rdworldwide. Abhijit Banerjee is ranked 163rd worldwide and Michael Kremer is ranked 260th worldwide.
12.29pm BST
Professor Avner Offer of Oxford University has welcomed today's awards, saying:
"An excellent prize this time.
[It] is long overdue recognition for an important field and some of its very best practitioners. This field also constitutes a rejection of standard economic theory, which it invokes very little and often not at all."
12.21pm BST
Nat Dyer of PEP, a new economics organisation, has flagged up that this year's award is notable for several other reasons, as well as the second female winner.
He says:
12.06pm BST
As Esther Duflo becomes just the second woman to be awarded the Nobel prize for economics in 50 years, a timely new campaign is being launched on Tuesday to increase diversity in the study of economics in the UK.
Currently economics students are disproportionately male and privately educated - one in six boys studying for A-levels takes economics compared with just one in 17 girls. The subject is also more popular in private schools, with one in five pupils choosing economics A-level, compared to one in 12 in the state sector.
"Economics is far too important to be left to just one half of the population. Today we have women at the helm of key global institutions such as the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund and female chief economists in place at some of the world's largest banks.
"But if you look behind these great role models, there are not so very many women coming up the ranks to succeed them. We need to develop a more reliable pipeline of young women entering the profession and I think this campaign could help."
"Economics and economists are hugely influential - their analysis and advice shapes the world. We need the very best talent to solve today and tomorrow's challenges, such as the issues raised by climate change, an ageing society, changing technologies or how we improve wellbeing.
"The economics profession is, and has always been, far too narrow. We need people with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives - including people from all over the UK and from differing socio-economic backgrounds - to join the profession and play a part in tackling these issues."
12.05pm BST
You can really get to grips with Kremer, Duflo and Banerjee's work by reading this 41-page scientific explainer.
It explains how the trio used empirical research to really dig into the causes of poverty, and to show in practices which policies actually work.
While theory can pinpoint certain incentives, it does not tell us how powerful these are in practice. To give just a few examples, theory cannot tell us whether temporarily employing additional contract teachers with a possibility of re-employment is a more cost-effective way to raise the quality of education than reducing class sizes. Neither can it tell us whether microfinance programs effectively boost entrepreneurship among the poor. Nor does it reveal the extent to which subsidized health-care products will raise poor people's investment in their own health.
Knowing the right quantitative answers to such specific questions is vital for enhancing human capital, increasing income, and improving health among the poor. Answering these questions requires an empirical approach that allows researchers to draw firm conclusions about causal effects.
11.55am BST
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (who, incidentally, are partners) took Kremer's work in Kenya, and proved that simply forcing children to spend more time in school didn't actually help tackle poverty.
The Nobel committee explains:
Banerjee, Duflo and their co-authors concluded that students appeared to learn nothing from additional days at school. Neither did spending on textbooks seem to boost learning, even though the schools in Kenya lacked many essential inputs. Moreover, in the Indian context Banerjee and Duflo intended to study, many children appeared to learn little: in results from field tests in the city of Vadodara fewer than one in five third-grade students could correctly answer first-grade curriculum math test questions.
In response to such findings, Banerjee, Duflo and co-authors argued that efforts to get more children into school must be complemented by reforms to improve school quality.
11.53am BST
Michael Kremer's pioneering work in Kenya more than two decades ago has helped to transform development economics, winning him a share of today's Nobel prize.
More textbooks per student did not improve average test scores, but did improve test scores of the most able students. Giving flip charts to schools had no effect on student learning. The two health interventions reduced school absenteeism, but did not improve test scores. In theory, the incentive program could lead teachers either to increase effort to stimulate longterm learning or, alternatively, to teach to the test.
The latter effect dominated. Teachers increased their efforts in test preparation, which raised test scores on exams linked to the incentives, but left test scores in unrelated exams unaffected.
11.44am BST
The Royal Swedish Academy have produced a 'popular science backgrounder' to explain Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer's work on fighting poverty.
For example, it proved that healthcare initiatives were much more effective when medicine was provided for free:
A field experiment by Kremer and co-author investigated how the demand for deworming pills for parasitic infections was affected by price. They found that 75 per cent of parents gave their children these pills when the medicine was free, compared to 18 per cent when they cost less than a US dollar, which is still heavily subsidised. Subsequently, many similar experiments have found the same thing: poor people are extremely price-sensitive regarding investments in preventive healthcare.
Low service quality is another explanation why poor families invest so little in preventive measures. One example is that staff at the health centres that are responsible for vaccinations are often absent from work. Banerjee, Duflo et al. investigated whether mobile vaccination clinics - where the care staff were always on site - could fix this problem. Vaccination rates tripled in the villages that were randomly selected to have access to these clinics, at 18% compared to 6%.
11.34am BST
The Royal Swedish Academy awards committee say they're optimistic that more female economists will be recognised in the future.
They point out that Esther Duflo won the John Bates Clark Medal for economists under 40 (often called the mini-Nobel) in 2010 -- that's a good clue to where future winners may come from.
11.26am BST
Q: What will you do with the prize money (the trio will share 9 million Swedish krona, or around 720,000)?
Duflo says that when she was eight or nine, she read that Marie Curie had spent her first Nobel Prize money on equipment for further research into radiation.
11.23am BST
"Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognised for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect they deserve."
- Esther Duflo at today's press conference announcing her prize. pic.twitter.com/vTVBus80Hv
11.23am BST
Q: What do you think about the risks from Brexit and trade wars?
We live in turbulent times, hard times, Esther Duflo replies, telling us:
Many people in rich companies are worried about their position in the world. They think they have lost their dignity and don't have the place in the world they deserve.
That is probably at the root of much of the turmoil we are seeing.
11.19am BST
Q: How does it feel to become the second women to win the Nobel prize for economics?
Esther Duflo says she hopes to represent all the women in economics.... and then warns that the economics profession simply doesn't treat women well enough.
We are a time when we are starting to realise in the profession that the way we conduct each other privately and publicly, is not conducive all the time to a very good environment for women.
Showing that it is possible for a women to succeed, and to be recognised for success, I hope will inspire many many other women to continue working, and many many other men to give them the respect they deserve, like every single human being.
11.10am BST
Esther Duflo is on the phone now, from California (She and Banerjee, who are married, both work at MIT while Michael Kremer is at Harvard).
She explains that the trio's work has focused on understanding the "deep, interconnected roots of poverty".
Our approach is to unpack the problems one by one, and examine them as scientifically as possible.
11.03am BST
Esther Duflo is also the youngest person to win the Nobel economics prize.
11.03am BST
The official announcement is online here.
It explains that The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has recognised Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer for "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Despite recent dramatic improvements, one of humanity's most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. More than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, around five million children under the age of five still die of diseases that could often have been prevented or cured with inexpensive treatments. Half of the world's children still leave school without basic literacy and numeracy skills.
This year's Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions - for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected.
10.58am BST
Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have won the Nobel Prize in economics for their experiment-based approach to tackling poverty -- in the fast-growing area of development economics .
The key to their research is to take the daunting issue of global poverty, and break it down into smaller questions -- which can be more credibly answered.
10.52am BST
Esther Duflo's success means we have a second female winner of the Nobel prize in economics, 50 years after it was first awarded.
The first was Elinor Ostrom in 2009.
10.51am BST
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/SuJfPoRe2N
10.49am BST
The 2019 Prize in Economic Sciences has been awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for their work alleviating global poverty.
10.42am BST
Not long now!
WATCH LIVE: Join us for the announcement of the 2019 Prize in Economic Sciences.
Hear the breaking news first - see the live coverage from 11:45am CEST.
Where are you watching from?#NobelPrizehttps://t.co/4G4ZrhCubW
10.36am BST
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has filled up, ready for the final Nobel prize of 2019 to be awarded.
We've added a live feed to the top of the blog - you might need to refresh the page to see it.
10.32am BST
10.25am BST
Winning a Nobel prize changes someone's life, and not always in a good way.
Seeing your life's work recognised must be a great feeling, and the money can't hurt either! But there are downsides -- including constant attention, and the danger that your every utterance suddenly carries rather more weight.
Those who win a Nobel are often propelled from a quiet life running a laboratory or writing books to minor celebrity overnight. Invitations to give talks, attend parties and pronounce opinions on a wide variety of topics come flooding in. Some are thrilled to have a platform from which to raise political issues and gain access to politicians, business leaders and the media. For others, this comes as a downside. The Anglo-Dutch laureate Sir Andre Geim joked that "journalists' questions" were one of the negatives.
Another physics laureate, Brian Schmidt told New Scientist magazine: "One of the pitfalls of being a Nobel winner is that our voices are too loud when it comes to providing personal opinion - and in this respect, I need to be far more careful than I used to be about what I say and what I write."
Related: What's the point of Nobel prizes?
10.15am BST
Excitement is building, with just 30 minutes until the economics Nobel is awarded.
If Paul Milgrom wins the @NobelPrize for Economics, will be a terrific recognition for the use of auctions as a tool in telecom and energy sectors at his firm https://t.co/7eIas7cYbr https://t.co/v324y1LhFw
Tomorrow Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced. Macrofinance guys to be awarded sound more logical to me but I also have a feeling that Claudia Goldin is a strong nominee not only bec. of her humanitarian perspective to econ but due to the global populism on gender politics
Would be amazing to celebrate diversity with this year's @NobelPrize e.g. non-white woman working in non-mainstream field of economics. It's good to dream in life... https://t.co/pektS4QMEL
9.56am BST
Bloomberg's Noah Smith has come up with an impressive list of potential winners.
1) The New Keynesians: Economists who have examined causes of recessions, and explained how policymakers need to act when the business cycle deteriorates. There's plenty of possible options, including: Michael Woodford, Stanley Fischer, Greg Mankiw, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Olivier Blanchard, Guillermo Calvo, Janet Yellen and David Romer.
Goldin identifies increasing education as a key driver of the fall in U.S. inequality in the early 20th century, and blames a slowdown in educational attainment for the reversal of that happy trend.
The economics Nobel tends to favor the work of pure theorists who work on the deepest problems. And few thinkers dig deeper than Stanford University's Paul Milgrom.
He was a major figure in the creation of auction theory -- probably the most empirically successful and practically useful economic theory of all time, which is now used to power everything from Google ads to federal spectrum auctions.
His most important thesis is that social institutions are crucial for development and don't change much over time -- places that develop institutions based on exploiting labor and extracting resources tend to do badly over the centuries, while those that create more inclusive systems flourish. More recently, Acemoglu has tackled the question of whether automation will make humans obsolete.
There are plenty of economists whose work is worthy of a Nobel. @Noahpinion narrows the field https://t.co/F5fdyypHI5 Great read for ambitious student economists.
9.41am BST
One female winner in 50 years really isn't good enough. And there are several women who could be recognised by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today.
Related: Duflo and Banerjee take the guesswork out of policies that help the poor | Madeleine Bunting
9.27am BST
Back in 2016, the FiveThirtyEight website calculated that:
The typical winner of the Nobel in economics is a 67-year-old man, born in the United States, who is working at the University of Chicago when he wins."
9.20am BST
Here are some facts on the Economics Sciences prize, from Nobelprize.org:
9.14am BST
Here's 2017's winner, Richard Thaler, with some inspiring words for those who found academia a struggle <raises hand>:
"I wasn't a great student. My thesis advisor famously said: 'We didn't expect much of him'" - Richard Thaler, 2017 Laureate in Economic Sciences.
Tomorrow the recipient(s) of the 2019 Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced - stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/NHeHP5GuIk
9.12am BST
Clarivate Analytics, a data provider, has produced a possible shortlist of candidates for today's award.
By adding up academic citations, they've worked out whose work is particularly highly regarded this year, making them worth winners.
Related: Economist who slated colleagues' work is tipped for Nobel
8.10am BST
Good morning. The final act of the 2019 Nobel Prize season is upon us.
The biggest prize in the world of economics will be awarded this morning, to recognise outstanding contributions to the discipline.
Coming up: We'll soon be announcing the recipient of the 2019 Prize in Economic Sciences.
Stay tuned to discover who it will be!#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/nx4ORG1R4E
Related: The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash
Related: US economists win Nobel prize for work on climate and growth
Continue reading...