Congrats to Esther Duflo

Congratulations to my MIT colleague Esther Duflo on winning this year's John Bates Clark Medal. The Medal is awarded to "that American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge."

She has been a pioneer in Randomized Field Experiments, which is a powerful way to test the impact of new policies. She helped found the Poverty Action Lab, which conducts experiments to learn which types of anti-poverty programs work best. I predict we'll see a lot more use of field experiments by academics, policy-makers and especially business managers to understand the causal effects of various policies. It's something I encourage my students to do as much as possible and advocate in my lecturing and advising to business executives.

Here is a list of her papers with the most citations in Google Scholar.

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