Teaching and Resources

This book grew, in part, out of years of teaching undergraduates and graduate students at MIT and elsewhere, and we hope that it can be used to support learning at various levels.

In the spring of 2011, we have been using the book for two courses: one, Challenges for World Poverty, an introductory course for students who do not have a background in economics. This course is a mix of lecture and discussion. Students read the book, as well as other papers, and they answer essay questions about the issues that they learn about. The second course, Foundations of Development Policies, is for advanced undergraduates and masters students.

In this section of the website, we provide the course materials from both. These materials include the lecture notes, assignments, and videos used throughout the course. We hope you will find this material useful as a supplementary resource to the book, and a way to enrich your learning experience.

Given that both courses are currently underway, this page will be regularly updated, so do check back often!

7 Lecture: Foundations of Development Policy: Credit
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lectures 18-20 on credit from the spring 2011 MIT masters course, Foundations of Development Policy.

7.1 Lecture: Challenges of world poverty: Lending to the Poor
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lecture 17 on the (not so simple) economics of lending to the poor, from the spring 2011 MIT undergraduate course, The Challenges of World Poverty.

7.2 Lecture: Challenges of world poverty: Microfinance
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lecture 18 on the promise and perils of microfinance, from the spring 2011 MIT undergraduate course, The Challenges of World Poverty.

Abhijit Banerjee, Pranab Bardhan, Esther Duflo, Erica Field, Dean Karlan, Asim Khwaja, Dilip Mookherjee, Rohini Pande, Raghuram Rajan / December 13, 2010 / Financial Times

A Financial Times article written in response to the November 2011 microcredit crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Challenges of world poverty: Essay Questions on Credit
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Essay questions on credit from the spring 2011 MIT undergraduate course, The Challenges of World Poverty.

Foundations of Development Policy: Problem Set 6
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Problem set 6 from the spring 2011 MIT masters course, Foundations of Development Policy.