NOBEL CAUSE

Nobel Prize in Economics Won by Three Anti-Poverty Academics

The academy said their work had “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice.”

The Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to three academics for their “experimental approach” to “alleviating global poverty.” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday morning that the prize will be shared among MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo and Harvard’s Michael Kremer. The academy's statement said the three have “dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice” and added: “As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefited from effective programs of remedial tutoring in schools.” The prize is 9 million Swedish krona, or around $915,000, which will be shared equally among the three. All of the academics are based at U.S. universities, though Banerjee was born in India and Duflo was born in France.