Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate.     Esther Duflo’s advice to students? Spend time in the field. “It's only through this exposure that you can learn how wrong most of your intuitions are and preconceptions are,” she explains. For Duflo, it was time spent in the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse. While there she saw how Jeff Sachs used the tools of economics to advise policymakers on matters of crucial importance. To her it seemed like the best job in the world—and she began to pursue it in earnest. Now it is she who is advising governments on how best to reduce poverty, having co-founded one of the leading policy research centers in the world. That work, together with that of frequent collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, has now been honored with the Nobel Prize.&nbsp;     She joined Tyler to discuss that work, including how coaching increases the effectiveness of cash transfers, why she cautions against falling in love with growth rates, what France gets right about child-rearing, the management philosophy behind her success building J-PAL, how she briefly became the face of an anti-Soviet revolution, the under-looked reasons behind the decline of geographic mobility in the United States, what rock climbing can teach us about being a good empirical economist, her daily musical move from Bach to Bob Dylan, and more.&nbsp;     Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos     Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu    Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email

Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action

Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate.  For this special retrospective episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to discuss the past year in conversations and more, including who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular—and the most underrated—conversation, a test of Tyler’s knowledge called “Name That Production Function,” listener questions from Twitter, how Tyler has boosted his productivity in the past year, and whether his book and movie picks from 2009 still hold up. &nbsp;   Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos     Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu  Follow Jeff on Twitter  Follow Tyler on Twitter Facebook Email

Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS)

Long before Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 economics Nobel with Michael Kremer and Esther Duflo, he was a fellow graduate student at Harvard with Tyler. For Tyler, Abhijit is one of the brightest economic minds he’s ever met, and “a brilliant theorist who decided the future was with empirical work.” But according to Abhijit, theory and practice go hand in hand: the real benefit of a randomized control trial isn’t getting unbiased estimates, he says, but in testing hypotheses borne out of theory.     Abhijit joined Tyler to discuss his unique approach to economics, including thoughts on premature deindustrialization, the intrinsic weakness of any charter city, where the best classical Indian music is being made today, why he prefers making Indian sweets to French sweets, the influence of English intellectual life in India, the history behind Bengali leftism, the best Indian regional cuisine, why experimental economics is underrated, the reforms he’d make to traditional graduate economics training, how his mother’s passion inspires his research, how many consumer loyalty programs he’s joined, and more.     Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate.     Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos     Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu  Follow Tyler on Twitter Facebook Newsletter

Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India

**This podcast has moved to a new host and new episodes will no longer be posted here as of 12/31/2019.**  For the latest episodes, please visit conversationswithtyler.com or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

Tyler Cowen engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. New conversations every other Wednesday.

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