Abhijit Banerjee

We value seriousness and willingness to solve problems. ”

I was very lucky to be born into a very academic family. I was well-read, well-trained in mathematics. I had lots of advantages to start with. ”

The AAP was not the first group of well-meaning outsiders in politics. ”

Well-designed subsidies help the poor make the best of whatever opportunities they have; poorly designed ones either do very little or actually make things worse for them. ”

I am not partisan in my economic thinking. We work with any number of state governments, many of which are BJP governments. ”

There is nothing remotely dignified about sorting through rotting trash to find something to feed your child, or asking someone for money because you have none (anyone who has contrived to give people money before they had to ask will never forget the look of gratitude in their eyes). ”

One great pleasure of being an academic is the ability to trade in ideas with your colleagues and students; it is not much fun being the only connoisseur of some fine point. ”

Corruption is a huge problem and the poor and the powerless are often its most egregious victims. But it is not an accident that the most effective bureaucracies in the world rely much more on internal controls rather than on independent ombudsmen. ”

It is possible that Modi sees his life as evidence that hard physical work can triumph over every disadvantage, but if so, most of us Indians do not share his faith. ”

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research. ”