Story map
Follow the question, method, turning points and impact behind this person's work.
The question or challenge
Policies intended to reduce poverty often sound sensible but can produce weaker, different or uneven results in real life. Duflo's work asks how researchers can replace confident assumptions with evidence about what people actually do and experience.
Their work and method
Duflo and other researchers break large questions into smaller testable ones and use field experiments, often randomised evaluations, to compare outcomes. This method can reveal indirect effects, differences between groups and gaps between what a policy is expected to do and what happens in practice.
Turning points
Duflo co-founded J-PAL to support evaluations and help evidence reach policymakers. In 2019 she, Banerjee and Kremer received the Prize in Economic Sciences for this experimental approach. Their work helped establish field experiments as an influential method in development economics.
Key moments
Experiments, pivots, and surprises. Look for what changed their thinking.
- 1Question
What happened: Researchers turn a broad claim such as 'this programme helps' into outcomes that can be observed and compared.
Lesson: A precise question makes it easier to discover when an appealing idea is wrong.
- 2Test
What happened: Field experiments compare different approaches in real settings rather than relying only on intuition.
Lesson: Evidence can reveal how people respond after the first intended effect.
- 3Interpretation
What happened: Researchers examine whether a result is large, lasting and likely to apply in other settings.
Lesson: Good evidence still needs careful interpretation before it becomes policy.
Impact
Work can create value and still involve limits or trade-offs. Look at both sides of the impact.
Positive
- +The experimental approach has improved the evidence available for decisions about education, health and other anti-poverty programmes.
- +J-PAL makes summaries of many evaluations available to policymakers and the public.
Trade-offs
- ±Randomised evaluations cannot answer every moral, political or system-level question.
- ±The well-known Kenya bed-net pricing study linked from this lesson was conducted by J-PAL affiliates Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas; it should not be attributed to Duflo personally.
- ±An experiment answers a defined question in a particular setting; it does not automatically show that the same result will occur everywhere. Researchers must consider ethics, measurement, local knowledge, longer-term effects and whether evidence from one context transfers to another.
What to remember
If you had to explain this story to a friend, what would you want them to remember?
- Ask what people are likely to do after the first effect of a decision.
- Use evidence to challenge a plausible story rather than only to confirm it.
- Check who conducted a study before attaching a famous person's name to its findings.
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Sources & further reading
- MIT Economics, Esther Duflo biography - https://economics.mit.edu/people/faculty/esther-duflo
- Nobel Prize, Esther Duflo facts - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/duflo/facts/
- J-PAL, Free bednets to fight malaria - https://www.povertyactionlab.org/case-study/free-bednets-fight-malaria
- J-PAL, Free Distribution or Cost Sharing? Evidence from a Malaria Prevention Experiment in Kenya - https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/free-distribution-or-cost-sharing-evidence-malaria-prevention-experiment-kenya