in awarding the prize to you and your fellow economists, abhijit banerjee and michael kremer, the nobelttee praised your experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. how would you explain what you do? so the idea is very simple. so first of all, you take a big problem, like how are we going to eradicate poverty, and break it into manageable pieces, pieces that — you know, smaller questions, but questions that admit rigourous answers. and then, once you have one of those questions, you deploy something which is very much like a randomised controlled trial in medicine to test one approach against the other. so, to give you an example, suppose that you want to know how to motivate parents to take their kids to be immunised. you could set up a randomised controlled trial, where in some villages, randomly chosen, you work with members of the community that are going to mobilise parents to get their kids immunised. in other communities, you send reminder text messages. and in yet another set of communities, you provide small incentives, say in the form of cellphone minutes, paid to pa

s abhijit banerjee and esther durro, the first d couple to win the nobel prize in economics.duflo,7, is also the youngest economics laureate ever and only the second woman to receive the prize. they met in the mid '90s, when duoko, then a grad student, bannerjee'se on economics and poverty. and, she says... >> i was going to study development no matter what happen. >> reporter: development to help poor people with data. careful thinking.ink sort of not go with your intuitions. because our intuitions are often wrong. >> reporter: or they've been taught to you in economics classes. >> by authority figures. >> reporter: bannerjee was such a figure. but economic theory, his forte, was totally divorced from the mumbaiborhood in which he grew up. >> and i played with the kids .from the slum all the ti and i think over time i started to realize that what i was doing could be connected with my previous life. >> reporter: previous life as an >> no, previous life as a little boy playing with other littl boys who didn't go to school. a little bit conscious of theys fact that the economi