BY LIZ WEBER

Perhaps it is unsurprising that in recent years — amidst a global recession and widespread critiques of financial markets — a new breed of economist is emerging from the halls of academe and garnering public attention.  Rather than focusing on the theoretical or anomalous, these researchers explore how applied economics can be used to shed insight on some of the toughest problems in international development, from improving the efficacy of HIV/AIDS education in Africa to understanding the impact of microcredit on quality of life.  An aspiring economist myself at the time, I first learned of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab after reading a NYTimes article published in early 2008.  When columnist David Leonhardt surveyed economists to find out who was using economics to make the world a better place, “the small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, were mentioned far more often than anyone else.”

Almost two years after that article was published, Esther Duflo, a faculty member at M.I.T., received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work.  As an article published by MIT boasts, Duflo “has gained renown for using the world as a laboratory to see why aid programs succeed or fail [and] in so doing, she has not just tweaked conventional wisdom but helped revitalize global antipoverty efforts.”  Although the experimental designs which often facilitate these types of analyses — randomized control trials in which persons are afforded different levels of treatment based on random assignments — are often hotly debated, they are constantly being refined and improved to ensure that the developing world does not become a testing ground for first-world tinkerers.  Despite the fact that the ultimate impact of these efforts is still largely unknown, it is encouraging that such research endeavors are being pursued (and rewarded) so vigorously.