Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the...

The 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the "extremely poor" people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor:...

We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and...

In the last few years, field experiments have emerged as an attractive new tool in the effort to elaborate our understanding of economic issues relevant to poor countries and poor people. By enabling the researcher to precisely control the variation in the data, field experiments allow the...

Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper presents evidence on a number of...