Inaugural Lecture by Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo, 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics and Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was at Sciences Po for the inaugural lesson of the School of Research about "Good Economics for Warmer Times".

Esther Duflo is an economist, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, holds an associate degree in economic and social sciences and a doctorate in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A specialist in development and micro-credit, she is recognized for her innovative working methods and experiences in the field.

She has received several academic awards and distinctions, including the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in honor of Alfred Nobel, awarded jointly with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer in 2019. In 2022, Esther Duflo was appointed Professor at the Collège de France, holder of the Chair of Poverty and Public Policy.

Esther Duflo's work focuses on the fields of development economics and in particular health, education or access to credit in developing countries. It uses the random experiment approach, which involves assessing the effects of a particular economic policy measure on a randomly selected group of individuals in relation to another group of individuals to whom it is not applied.

For example, thanks to the results of her work, many countries have decided to fund important preventive health actions and more than 5 million children in India have benefited from school support programmes.

Good economics for warmer times

>Climate change is not just about getting the right technology. It is also about changing behavior and policies. And it is not (only) about the end of the world: it is also about the damage it does, today, mainly to poor people around the world.  In this lecture, Professor Duflo will discuss some of what we know about the impact of climate change on poor countries, and what we know and what we do not know about changing behavior and policies.

[The inaugural lecture will be held in English, and will be followed by a questions and answers session both in French and in English. It is exclusively reserved for first-year Masters students at the School of Research and Sciences Po's new doctoral students.]

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