When I was a graduate student, I actually took a course in development economics and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

Abhijit Banerjee Quotes