Prof. Abhijit Banerjee
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
An Indian economist who is currently the Professor of Economics at MIT, Prof. Banerjee is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, along with being a Member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty. His prior appointments also include: President of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development; Research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research; A Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research; An International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute; Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Science; Fellow at the Econometric Society. He also has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.
He completed his M.A. in Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, 1983, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1988.
Prof. Banerjee was honored with the Infosys Prize 2009 for his outstanding contributions to the economic theory of development, and for his pioneering work in the empirical evaluation of public policy.
He is the co-author of Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Most recently, he served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.