Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee to join ENS-PSL and PSE for the 2020–2021 academic year

By working together, our institutions were able to offer these colleagues a research environment befitting their work and their talent, Alain Fuchs, President of PSL

Professor Abhijit Banerjee will be Research Professor at PSL and affiliated with the Economics department at the École normale supérieure (ENS-PSL). Professor Duflo will be Visiting Professor at ENS - PSL. They will both conduct their research at PSE within the CNRS unit.

“By working together, our institutions were able to offer these colleagues a research environment befitting their work and their talent,” enthused Alain Fuchs, President of PSL. “In deciding to accept our invitation, they have affirmed the international appeal of our university and the excellent quality of the economics research being done in France, and at PSE and ENS-PSL in particular.”

For PSE Director Jean-Olivier Hairault, “Having Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee as part of our research and learning community is a wonderful opportunity for the institution, the students, and the researchers.”  He sees their stay as a concrete example of the working partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), whose European regional office is based at PSE, adding that the Nobel Prize winners will thus be “extending existing and ongoing collaboration with many PSE researchers.”

ENS-PSL Director Marc Mézard is also thrilled by the arrival of Abhijit Banerjee, and the return of Esther Duflo to ENS-PSL (a 1992 graduate of their Liberal Arts program). He admires the intellectual and moral example that these two scholars set for students and young people increasingly sensitive to global challenges, citing, for example, from Duflo’s inaugural lecture at ENS-PSL this week:  “What can I do to pay back the enormous debt I owe the world for being lucky enough to be born where I was born, and to have studied what I have studied before becoming part of a school such as this? (15.09.2020)

The results of the research done by Duflo and Banerjee are intended to be shared as widely as possible. In their latest book, Good Economics for Hard Times (published in French translation by Seuil in 2020), they discuss and underline “the importance of doing innovative, interdisciplinary research, and of putting economics to work for human dignity.”