Poverty specialist wins Baby Nobel

Esther Duflo,an MIT professor from France who finds unorthodox ways to help the world's poor won the John Bates Clark medal.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor from France who finds unorthodox ways to help the world’s poor won the John Bates Clark medal on Friday,the so-called Baby Nobel given to the most promising economist in the United States under age 40.

Esther Duflo,37,is the director and co-founder of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT,known as J-PAL,where she and her team work on ways to make sure money spent to help poor people in developing countries is used most effectively.

“I wanted to do something that was relevant,” Duflo said in a 2010 interview with MIT’s Technology Review about why she entered the field of poverty studies.

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J-PAL is a network of academics around the world who assess the effectiveness of poverty relief and development programs.

Some of Duflo’s recent research has focused on designing incentives to boost fertilizer use in Kenya and motivating teachers in India to have better attendance.

She also worked with the 2009 Clark medal winner,Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley,on how various social pressures could encourage Americans to save more for retirement.

That work has earned her several awards including a 2009 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

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The Clark medal,awarded by the American Economic Association,has been dubbed the “Baby Nobel” because a dozen past winners,including Paul Krugman,Gary Becker and Joseph Stiglitz,have gone on to win the Nobel Prize for economics.

Duflo is the second woman to win the Clark medal. The first was Harvard economist Susan Athey in 2007. The medal was awarded every two years between 1947 and 2009. Starting this year,it will be given annually.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the designation gives law enforcement “enhanced powers to combat a group that has instilled fear through violence and intimidation”.

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