On Monday, Mumbai-born Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics jointly with his wife Esther Duflo and another economist Michael Kremer.

They bagged the award for their "experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His French-American wife also works at MIT, while Kremer is at Harvard University.

Duflo became the second woman and the youngest ever to win a Nobel Economics Prize.

Banerjee studied at the University of Calcutta and Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. He went on to receive his PhD in 1988 from Harvard University.

The 58-year old is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize.

Duflo has a PhD from MIT and is currently the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the MIT.

The Nobel Prize includes 9 million-kronor ($918,000) cash, a gold medal and a diploma. The prize money will be shared by the winners equally.