The University of Zurich (UZH) has announced that Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join its Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics in July 2026. Both currently teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, as per a report by Financial Express.

The duo, who received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences along with Michael Kremer for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty,” will move to Zurich to establish a new centre for development economics at UZH.

Leaving MIT to build a new centre in Zurich

In a statement, UZH confirmed that Duflo and Banerjee will each hold an endowed professorship supported by the Lemann Foundation. Their focus will remain on development economics, studying how policies in areas such as education, poverty, and healthcare can drive social change.

The pair will also lead the Lemann Centre for Development, Education and Public Policy, an initiative backed by a CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation.

Jorge Paulo Lemann, founder and chairman of the foundation, said, “This partnership reflects my trust in Brazil and Switzerland and the power of the two countries working together. It has special significance for my family and our initiative in education.”

According to reports, the couple’s decision to relocate follows growing concerns in the United States over cuts to research funding and threats to academic freedom, prompting discussions about a potential “brain drain” of top researchers.

Who are Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee?

Esther Duflo currently holds the Abdul Latif Jameel Professorship of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She also chairs the Poverty and Public Policy course at the Collège de France and serves as President of the Paris School of Economics. Duflo is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society.

Abhijit Banerjee, born in Mumbai, comes from a family of economics professors. He studied at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University before earning his PhD from Harvard University in 1998. Banerjee has held academic positions at Harvard and Princeton before joining MIT as the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society.

Personal and professional partnership

Banerjee and Duflo met during her doctoral studies at MIT, where Banerjee served as her PhD supervisor. The two married in 2015 and co-founded J-PAL along with Sendhil Mullainathan, a global research network that evaluates the effectiveness of poverty-alleviation interventions.

Banerjee was previously married to Dr Arundhati Tuli Banerjee, with whom he had one son who passed away in 2016. He and Duflo now have two children, Noemie and Milan.