Economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for creating an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.
"This year's Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," the academy said in statement.
Banerjee and Duflo are both at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Kremer is at Harvard University. Duflo is only the second woman to win the economics prize, after Elinor Ostrom got it in 2009, and is also the youngest ever to receive the economics award.
Duflo, who was woken up by Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday, said that getting the prize was "incredibly humbling."
The 9 million Swedish crown ($915,300) economics prize is a later addition to the five awards created in the will of industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, established by the Swedish central bank and first awarded in 1969.
Last week, six Nobel prizes were given – medicine, physics and chemistry plus two literature awards, and the coveted Peace Prize.
All but the winner of the Peace Prize receive their awards on Dec. 10 – the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896 - in Stockholm. The winner of the Peace Prize receives the award in Oslo, Norway.
(FRANCE 24 with AP, REUTERS)