3 share Nobel economics prize for work on alleviating poverty


Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer won the Nobel Prize in economics "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday. The committee said the winners' research "involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions — for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health."
Kremer and his colleagues used field experiments in the 1990s to test interventions on improving school results in Kenya, The Associated Press explains. Banerjee and Duflo, who are married and work at MIT, followed with similar research in other countries, often working with Harvard's Kremer. "Our approach is to unpack the problems one by one, and examine them as scientifically as possible," said Duflo, the second woman and the youngest person to win the prize.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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