Abhijit Banerjee And Esther Duflo To Come Up With Second Book

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of MIT have picked a great time for their second book’s release. The book is titled Good Economics for Hard Times and has come out exactly a month after the two had shared Nobel Prize in Economics with Michael Kremer.

Banerjee and Duflo, who are co-authors and are also married to each other, have been pioneering the use of controlled trials that are randomized when it comes to development economics as they use field experiments for the evaluation of specific policies in areas such as cash transfers, teacher absenteeism, sanitation, and drunk driving. In 2011, their first book by the name of Poor Economics had gone in-depth of method and how foreign & public policies can be changed in the developing countries.

This book has been said to tackle the issues in both rich & poor countries and has set their sights on the big-ticket issues of macroeconomics that is the impact of automation and trade on workers, etc. In this book, they have tried to accumulate evidence from the credible and recent economic papers and have given their take on what the data reveals to us.

Both Banerjee and Duflo themselves are immigrants and therefore, their thoughts on immigration are interesting for the readers who have been waiting for this book. The topic of costs and benefits of trade and immigration has become very contentious when it comes to politics of the recent years. The economists have on immigration said that if anything has to be considered, it is that immigration is not happening enough. On trade, they have emphasized more on the need for a more extensive program that supports those who lose their jobs due to trade shocks.