Esther Duflo
Biographic Data
| ID | 1374735 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Esther Duflo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Esther |
| FAMILY NAME | Duflo |
| SIGNATURE | DUFLO E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6105-617X |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 377 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Socio‐Cultural Drivers of Environmental Sustainability in the Nordic Countries
This manuscript, first published 10th February 2026, is temporarily taken down. Following an investigation of potential concerns, a corresponding amendment to the publication record might be published at a later point
Chat over coffee? Diffusion of agronomic practices and market spillovers in Rwanda
Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior When Information Is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the Covid-19 Pandemic in West Bengal
Can information from a credible messenger shift behavior in an information-saturated environment? In a randomized controlled trial involving twenty-eight million individuals in West Bengal, we find that SMS-delivered video messages containing information about COVID-19 symptoms and health-preserving behaviors recorded by a credible messenger increased adherence to targeted and non-targeted preventive behaviors, measured by two objective measures …
Depression and Loneliness among the Elderly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
We combine data from longitudinal surveys in seven low- and middle-income countries (plus the United States for comparison) to document that depressive symptoms among those aged 55 and above are prevalent in those countries and, unlike in the United States, increase sharply with age. Depressive symptoms in one survey wave are associated with a greater decline in ability to carry out basic daily activities and a higher probability of death in the …
The future of human behaviour research
Doctors' and Nurses' Social Media Ads Reduced Holiday Travel and Covid-19 Infections
We thank the health team at Facebook for their in-kind financial
Économie utile pour des temps difficiles
Les auteurs analysent les grands problèmes contemporains, tels que l'immigration, le libre-échange, la croissance, les inégalités et le changement climatique, afin de déconstruire les fausses évidences et les conclusions trop rapides, discutant les affirmations de la pensée économique comme les arguments des discours populistes. Ils proposent des alternatives pour bâtir un monde plus juste. ©Electre 2020
On the road
Double/debiased machine learning for treatment and structural parameters
We revisit the classic semi‐parametric problem of inference on a low‐dimensional parameter θ0 in the presence of high‐dimensional nuisance parameters η0. We depart from the classical setting by allowing for η0 to be so high‐dimensional that the traditional assumptions (e.g. Donsker properties) that limit complexity of the parameter space for this object break down. To estimate η0, we consider the use of statistical or machine learning (ML) method…
How Much do Existing Borrowers Value Microfinance? Evidence from an Experiment on Bundling Microcredit and Insurance
Randomized controlled trials have found only modest effects of microfinance, but these studies focus on new clients. Existing estimates may thus understate ongoing gains for more experienced borrowers and the longer‐run potential of microfinance. We estimate impacts of microfinance on experienced borrowers, using an episode when a microfinance institution modestly increased existing clients’ fees in randomly selected villages (in exchange for a m…
Handbook of Economic Field Experiments
The Economist as Plumber
As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This …
Can iron-fortified salt control anemia? Evidence from two experiments in rural Bihar
From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies
The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us-possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts-to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small "proof-of-concept" studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented…
Up in Smoke
Laboratory studies suggest that improved cooking stoves can reduce indoor air pollution, improve health, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. We provide evidence, from a large-scale randomized trial in India, on the benefits of a common, laboratory-validated stove with a four-year follow-up. While smoke inhalation initially falls, this effect disappears by year two. We find no changes across health outcomes or greenhouse…
Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A "Labeled Cash Transfer" for Education
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a "labeled cash transfer" (LCT): a small cash transfer made to fathers of school-aged children in poor rural communities, not conditional on school attendance but explicitly labeled as an education support program…
Field Experiments on Discrimination
This article reviews the existing field experimentation literature on the prevalence of discrimination, the consequences of such discrimination, and possible approaches to undermine it.We highlight key gaps in the literature and ripe opportunities for future field work.Section 1 reviews the various experimental methods that have been employed to measure the prevalence of discrimination, most notably audit and correspondence studies; it also descr…
The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group-lending microcredit program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in takeup of microcredit. Small business investment and profits of preexisting businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly increase. Durable goods expenditure increased, while “temptation goods” expenditure declined. …
School governance, teacher incentives, and pupil–teacher ratios
Education, HIV, and Early Fertility
A seven-year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls' dropout, pregnancy, and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection (STI). The government's HIV curriculum, which stresses abstinence until marriage, does not reduce pregnancy or STI. Both programs combined reduce STI more, but cut dropout and pregnancy less, than education subsidies alone. These results are inconsistent with a model of schooling and sexu…
Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up
We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages did. Among households identified as more likely to borrow, microcredit access led to a significant rise in investment in assets used for self-employment activities, and an increase in profit, but also to a reduction in income from ca…
Do Firms Want to Borrow More? Testing Credit Constraints Using a Directed Lending Program
This article uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. While both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other sources of credit), constrained firms will use it to expand production, while unconstrained firms will primarily use it as a substitute for other borrowing. We apply these observat…
Gossip
Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up
Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up
This paper reports the results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco starting in 2006 by Al Amana, the country's largest microfinance institution. Al Amana was the only MFI operating in the study areas during the evaluation period. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages. Among households identified as more likely to borrow based on ex-…
Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Cote d'Ivoire
We study resource allocation within households in Côte d'Ivoire.In Côte d'Ivoire, as in much of Africa, husbands and wives farm separate plots, and there is some specialization by gender in the crops that are grown.These different crops are differentially sensitive to particular kinds of rainfall shocks.We find that conditional on overall levels of expenditure, the composition of household expenditure is sensitive to the gender of the recipient o…
The Economic Lives of the Poor
The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. A number of recent data sets and a body of new research allow us to …
On the road
What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes around the World
We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society. In a second, perhaps more conventional view, the middle class is primarily a source of vital inputs for the e…
The medium run effects of educational expansion
Field Experiments on Discrimination
This article reviews the existing field experimentation literature on the prevalence of discrimination, the consequences of such discrimination, and possible approaches to undermine it.We highlight key gaps in the literature and ripe opportunities for future field work.Section 1 reviews the various experimental methods that have been employed to measure the prevalence of discrimination, most notably audit and correspondence studies; it also descr…
From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies
The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us-possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts-to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small "proof-of-concept" studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented…
Can iron-fortified salt control anemia? Evidence from two experiments in rural Bihar
Addressing Absence
Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper presents evidence on a number of innovative strategies to reduce absenteeism in government- and nongovernmental organization-run schools and health facilities. These strategies were implemented in…
Giving Credit Where It Is Due
In the last few years, field experiments have emerged as an attractive new tool in the effort to elaborate our understanding of economic issues relevant to poor countries and poor people. By enabling the researcher to precisely control the variation in the data, field experiments allow the estimation of parameters and testing of hypotheses that would be very difficult to implement with observational data. The results of this body of empirical wor…
Depression and Loneliness among the Elderly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
We combine data from longitudinal surveys in seven low- and middle-income countries (plus the United States for comparison) to document that depressive symptoms among those aged 55 and above are prevalent in those countries and, unlike in the United States, increase sharply with age. Depressive symptoms in one survey wave are associated with a greater decline in ability to carry out basic daily activities and a higher probability of death in the …
The future of human behaviour research
Child Health and Household Resources in South Africa
This paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the Old Age Pension program in South Africa on child health. Did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition? Does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact? The answers to these questions have very important policy implications. There is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood (and even in utero) affects long-t…
Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of School Construction in Indonesia
Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record. Combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1,000 children led to an average increase of 0.12 to 0.19 years of education, as well as a 1.5 to 2.7 percent increase in wages. This impl…
Grandmothers and Granddaughters
This article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in South Africa on children's nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact. In the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the South African social pension program were expanded for the black population. In 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas. More than a quarter of black South African child…
Inequality and Growth
The Role of Information and Social Interactions in Retirement Plan Decisions
This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benefits information fair organized by the university, by promising a monetary reward for attendance. The experiment multiplied by more th…
Wealth, Health, and Health Services in Rural Rajasthan
What are the determinants of health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, 2001), have argued? This paper reports on a recent survey in a poor rural area of the state of Rajasthan in …
The Impact of Education on Fertility and Child Mortality
This paper takes advantage of a massive school construction program that took place in Indonesia between 1973 and 1978 to estimate the effect of education on fertility and child mortality. Time and region varying exposure to the school construction program generates instrumental variables for the average education in the household, and the difference in education between husband and wife. We show that female education is a stronger determinant of…
How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?
Most papers that employ Differences-in-Differences estimation (DD) use many years of data and focus on serially correlated outcomes but ignore that the resulting standard errors are inconsistent. To illustrate the severity of this issue, we randomly generate placebo laws in state-level data on female wages from the Current Population Survey. For each law, we use OLS to compute the DD estimate of its “effect” as well as the standard error of this …
Women as Policy Makers
This data set uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village's councils. Data sets based upon information provided by GP Pradhans, local villagers, and the 1991 Indian Census
The medium run effects of educational expansion
Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Cote d'Ivoire
We study resource allocation within households in Côte d'Ivoire.In Côte d'Ivoire, as in much of Africa, husbands and wives farm separate plots, and there is some specialization by gender in the crops that are grown.These different crops are differentially sensitive to particular kinds of rainfall shocks.We find that conditional on overall levels of expenditure, the composition of household expenditure is sensitive to the gender of the recipient o…
Chapter 7 Growth Theory through the Lens of Development Economics
Why Political Reservations?
Addressing Absence
Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper presents evidence on a number of innovative strategies to reduce absenteeism in government- and nongovernmental organization-run schools and health facilities. These strategies were implemented in…
Remedying Education
This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution. A computer-assisted learning program f…
Dams
This paper studies the productivity and distributional effects of large irrigation dams in India. Our instrumental variable estimates exploit the fact that river gradient affects a district's suitability for dams. In districts located downstream from a dam, agricultural production increases, and vulnerability to rainfall shocks declines. In contrast, agricultural production shows an insignificant increase in the district where the dam is located …
Chapter 61 Using Randomization in Development Economics Research
The Economic Lives of the Poor
The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. A number of recent data sets and a body of new research allow us to …
Putting a Band-Aid on a Corpse
The public Indian health care system is plagued by high staff absence, low effort by providers, and limited use by potential beneficiaries who prefer private alternatives. This artice reports the results of an experiment carried out with a district administration and a nongovernmental organization (NGO). The presence of government nurses in government public health facilities (subcenters and aid-posts) was recorded by the NGO, and the government …
How High Are Rates of Return to Fertilizer? Evidence from Field Experiments in Kenya
How High Are Rates of Return to Fertilizer? Evidence from Field Experiments in Kenya by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer and Jonathan Robinson. Published in volume 98, issue 2, pages 482-88 of American Economic Review, May 2008
What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes around the World
We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society. In a second, perhaps more conventional view, the middle class is primarily a source of vital inputs for the e…
Délicates questions ethniques
Expérience, science et lutte contre la pauvreté
Au cours des dix dernières années, une nouvelle approche de l’étude du développement économique et de la pauvreté a émergé : l’approche expérimentale. Les politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté sont testées lors d’expériences pilotes menées avec la rigueur des essais cliniques. Idées nouvelles et solutions anciennes sont évaluées sur le terrain, ce qui permet d’identifier les politiques efficaces et celles qui ne le sont pas. Ce faisant, nous amé…
Expérience, science et lutte contre la pauvreté
Monsieur l’Administrateur,Chers collègues,Chers amis, En 2005, 1,4 milliard de personnes vivaient avec moins d’un dollar par jour ; chaque année, au moins 27 millions d’enfants ne reçoivent pas les vaccinations essentielles, 536 000 femmes meurent en couches, et plus de 6,5 millions d’enfants meurent avant leur premier anniversaire ; plus de la moitié des enfants scolarisés en Inde sont incapables de lire un texte d’un paragraphe. Devant l’ampleu…
The Experimental Approach to Development Economics
Randomized experiments have become a popular tool in development economics research and have been the subject of a number of criticisms. This paper reviews the recent literature and discusses the strengths and limitations of this approach in theory and in practice. We argue that the main virtue of randomized experiments is that, owing to the close collaboration between researchers and implementers, they allow the estimation of parameters that wou…
Economics (50 works) · Political science (27 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (27 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Economic growth (20 works) · Medicine (19 works) · Demographic economics (17 works) · Business (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Geography (12 works)