The three winners of the Nobel Prize in economics will donate their prize money to the Weiss Fund that supports economic research for the next 15 years.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer announced that they would donate their prize money to fund grants for Research in Development Economics, which is administered by Harvard University.
The three 2019 Economics Nobel Laureates, all from Cambridge higher education institutions were honoured by the Nobel Committee for their research on fighting poverty, and the proven ability of these approaches for improving the lives of poor people globally.
Their donation, which totals about $916,000, will supplement $50 million from Child Relief International, a foundation established by Andrew and Bonnie Weiss.
The Nobel Laureates donations will support research by undergraduates, graduate students and junior and senior faculty across several notable institutes until 2035.
The Nobel Laureates in Economics winners
Abhijit Banerjee, 58, graduated from the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also served on the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
Michael Kremer, 55, graduated from Harvard University A.B. in Social Studies in 1985 and PhD in Economics in 1992. He was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1992 to 1993, visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago in spring 1993, and professor at MIT from 1993 to 1999. Since 1999, he has been a professor at Harvard.
Esther Duflo, 47, received her PhD in 1999 from MIT. She is the second woman and the youngest woman to win the Nobel in Economic Sciences.
Duflo is the Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab which was established in 2003.
The Weiss Fund
The Weiss Fund has supported development in economics research at select universities in the United States since 2012. The Fund was established to minimise the bureaucratic effort required to apply for funding of economic research.
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