Esther Duflo specializes in development economics. She obtained her Masters in Economics from DELTA and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1995, and completed her Ph.D. in Economics at MIT in 1999. In 2010, she received the John Bates Clark Medal, and in 2009, she was the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She has also received the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Elaine Bennett Prize for Research.

Duflo's work focuses on the evaluation in developing countries of the efficacy of policies and initiatives put forth by governments and non-governmental organizations involving education reform, political participation, within-family patterns of resource allocation, and health care delivery. She is also interested in the political economy of public goods provision and gender issues and the economics of the family.

She co-founded the Poverty Action Lab, a research center at MIT focusing on randomized evaluation of anti-poverty programs.