The French researcher is a colaureate with the Americans Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, all three rewarded for their experiences in the field in the fight against poverty. She is the youngest and the second woman ever rewarded.
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The youngest (46), one of only two women (after Elinore Ostrom in 2009), the fourth French laureate (versus 62 Americans) of the Economics Bank of Sweden prize in memory of Alfred Nobel: Esther Duflo "ticks" several boxes that mark this 2019 edition of the Nobel Prize in Economics. " To be honest, I did not think it was possible to win the Nobel as young ", reacted Mme Duflo, in a telephone interview with the academy. The rarity of women's achievements is due to the fact that"There are not enough women economists anyway", she lamented. But "This is changing," assured the young woman, Hoping, receiving this distinction, being able to represent a model ".
But through her and her two fellow winners, the Americans Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, it is actually the work of a research laboratory, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which are rewarded.
The first two, husband and wife in the city, co-founded J-PAL in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the third, Michael Kremer, a former MIT scholar at Harvard, published in 2004 a landmark article in the journal Econometrica, where he used a banal method of medical research, "Random sampling assessment" (randomized controlled trials, RCT), to evaluate the impact of administering a drug to Kenyan children on … their school attendance. The principle of RCT is to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment by comparing the situation of a sample of "treated" population, called "test population", to that of an untreated population, the so-called "control population". or "control group".
The method is in fact not new in the social sciences: it was used in the 1960s to evaluate the effects of the "war on poverty" measures of President Lyndon B. Johnson through such experiments. in New Jersey, but also in the field of education. Then it fell into disuse, with economists preferring to base their prescriptions on mathematical models based on statistics – including modeling human behavior – rather than on field experiments.
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