Indian American economist Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo received their 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics at a ceremony in Stockholm on Tuesday. Banerjee donned a dhoti while Duflo sported a sari for the occasion. The husband-wife duo shared the prestigious award with fellow economist Michael Kremer.

The three researchers were awarded "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Banerjee and Duflo work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while Kremer is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University.

Born in Kolkata, Banerjee attended South Point School and Presidency College in the city before heading to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi for his master’s degree. He obtained a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 1988.

Speaking with CNBC-TV18 after the announcement of the prize in October, Banerjee said that it was a recognition for their work over the past two decades.

“It is for the work we have been doing for the last 20 years and the work involves trying to figure out why particular interventions work or don’t work or what works well and the way we do that is by organizing large-scale randomized trials, large scale experiments where you try out the programme.

“Here you see if it works, if it doesn’t work you try out something else, you tweak it till you find a solution. This style of doing work has now become the dominant way of doing work in the policy space and I think we were the people who pushed it when nobody else was doing and so this is recognition for that work - that sort of starting this machine in a sense.”