As I went through more than 100 of recent economics Nobel laureate Esther Duflo's publications earlier this week, I was struck by a few themes.
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1. THE VALUE OF DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS. Duflo is best known for her experimental work, but she has paper after paper describing how poor people live, their health, their spending. It's important to understand the problem as well as test solutions.
2. THE VALUE OF REPORTING ON INTERVENTIONS THAT DON'T YIELD THE EXPECTED RESULTS. Whether it's a fortified salt program that didn't improve health as hoped or a monitoring system that fell apart after a year, in Duflo's work we learn from the failures as well as the successes
3. THE VARIETY OF TOOLS TO IDENTIFY CAUSAL IMPACTS. Again, this may not be what most associate with Duflo, but from the impact of large dam construction to that of a large income shock in childhood, Duflo uses a wide array of causal impact identification strategies.
Related to this, she, Banerjee, and Kremer wrote how the real possibility of experiments raises the bar for quasi-experimental work. economics.mit.edu/files/16473 
4. A WILLINGNESS TO LOOK BEYOND THE PURELY "ECONOMIC." As I went through Duflo's work, I saw repeated references to the value of equity for its own sake (separate from impacts on growth or efficiency), on human dignity, on freedom, on the value of hope. It was refreshing.
5. GREAT WRITING. Duflo is a brilliant thinker, and she's also a clear, powerful writer. Even buried in brief book reviews from 15 years ago, I found thoughtful, evocative turns of phrase. In case there's any doubt that there's value in expressing great ideas well...
(I saw the same in Michael Kremer's writing in my earlier review of his work.) cgdev.org/blog/quick-gui…
It was great to spend a few hours among the products of a great mind and a good person. Disclosure: Esther was my professor and mentor in grad school and I was an RA on an early field experiment of hers. scholar.harvard.edu/files/kremer/f…
Many thanks to @AcostaAminaM of @CGDev for tracking down links to almost all of Duflo's work and identifying citation counts. (I got to do the fun part.)
THE END
THE END
@AcostaAminaM @CGDev (Actually, Duflo is in her 40s, so hopefully we're NOWHERE NEAR the end.)
