A French researcher on global poverty has become the second woman ¨C and the youngest person ¨C to win the Nobel prize in economics.

Esther Duflo, 46, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences ¨C known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics ¨C on 14?October, sharing the honour with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee (also at MIT) and Michael Kremer, from Harvard University.

The Nobel committee commended the laureates for their ¡°experimental approach to alleviating global poverty¡±, saying that ¡°as a direct result of one of their studies, more than five?million Indian children have benefited from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools¡±.

Their work ¡°introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty¡± by ¡°dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions ¨C for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health¡±, the committee said.

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¡°Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics,¡± it added.

The award recognises the work of Professor Kremer and his colleagues in the mid-1990s, which ¡°demonstrated how powerful this approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya¡±.

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Professors Duflo and Banerjee, a Mumbai-born born economist, often in collaboration with Professor Kremer, then performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries, the committee added.

Professor Duflo ¨C who took her PhD at MIT under the supervision of Professor Banerjee, and her undergraduate degree at the ?cole Normale Sup¨¦rieure in Paris ¨C is now the only living female Nobel economics laureate. The only other woman to win the honour, introduced in 1969, was 2009¡¯s laureate, Elinor Ostrom, who died in 2012.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com