All books are the product of many minds but this one more so than most. Chiki Sarkar encouraged us to pursue this project before we had any idea of where we were headed. Her enthusiasm, lively intelligence, and faith in our abilities led us and supported us throughout this project. A little bit later in the project Andrew Wylie joined in. The backing of his vast experience gave us the confidence to proceed. Neel Mukherjee read the entire manuscript in its first, raw, version and gave us direction, style advice, and above all reassurance that this was a book worth writing and perhaps even reading. Maddie McKelway did extraordinary work to ensure that every fact in the manuscript was correctly checked and cited, and that every sentence made (at least some) sense. Clive Priddle, as with our previous book, understood exactly where we were trying to go, often before we did so ourselves. His edits made this a book.
In writing a book that ventures much beyond our “core competence,” we had to rely heavily on the wisdom of many of our economist friends. Being surrounded by so many brilliant people, it is impossible to remember where every idea came from. Listing some risks excluding many others, but we feel compelled to name (without implicating, of course) Daron Acemoglu, David Atkin, Arnaud Costinot, Dave Donaldson, Rachel Glennerster, Penny Goldberg, Michael Greenstone, Bengt Holmstrom, Michael Kremer, Ben Olken, Thomas Piketty, Emma Rothschild, Emmanuel Saez, Frank Schilbach, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Ivan Werning. Thank you so much for educating us. Thank you also to our PhD advisors, Josh Angrist, Jerry Green, Andreu Mas Colell, Eric Maskin, and Larry Summers; and our many teachers, collaborators, friends, and students, all of whose imprints are everywhere in the book. Again at the risk of being grossly unfair, the book would not be the way it is without the influence of, among others, Philippe Aghion, Marianne Bertrand, Arun Chandrasekhar, Daniel Cohen, Bruno Crepon, Ernst Fehr, Amy Finkelstein, Maitreesh Ghatak, Rema Hanna, Matt Jackson, Dean Karlan, Eliana La Ferrara, Matt Low, Ben Moll, Sendhil Mullainathan, Kaivan Munshi, Andrew Newman, Paul Niehaus, Rohini Pande, Nancy Qian, Amartya Sen, Bob Solow, Cass Sunstein, Tavneet Suri, and Robert Townsend.
Our year of leave at the Paris School of Economics was a godsend. It was a pleasant and fun place to work, both collegial and lively. We are especially grateful to Luc Behagel, Denis Cogneau, Olivier Compte, Hélène Giacobino, Mark Gurgand, Sylvie Lambert, and Karen Macours; and to Gilles Postel-Vinay and Katia Zhuravskaya for their always-welcoming smiles, much fun conversation, and many sweaty games of tennis. Our MIT colleagues Glenn and Sara Ellison, who coordinated their sabbaticals with us, made the year all the more wonderful. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Région Île-de-France (Chaire Blaise Pascal), the Axa Research Fund, the ENS Foundation, Paris School of Economics, and MIT. We thank them for their support.
For over 15 years, the J-PAL crew has not only fed our research fire, but also kept us optimistic about both economics and humankind. We are infinitely fortunate to work with kind, generous and dedicated people every day, year after year. Thank to Iqbal Dhaliwal who steers the ship and to John Floretta, Shobhini Mukherjee, Laura Poswell and Anna Schrimpf, who are our daily companions, seen and unseen. And, of course, to Heather McCurdy and Jovanna Mason for valiantly attempting to put some semblance of order into our lives.
Esther’s parents, Michel and Violaine Duflo, and her brother Colas and his family were a huge part of why we had such a lovely time in Paris. Thank you for everything you do for us, year after year.
Abhijit’s parents, Dipak and Nirmala Banerjee, are for him always the ideal readers for what he writes. He thanks them for teaching him so much of the economics he knows and, perhaps more importantly, the reasons why he should care.