A Harvard economist and two from MIT have won the Nobel Prize for their breakthrough in improving the lives of the poor.
Their novel approach was to apply a method used in medicine to figure out what works in economics.
Abhijit Banerjee said his "a-ha" moment came in 1990, when he started to doubt the work of economists in his field, including his own.
"Some of it, I thought, was a little bit hokey, and that made it much more attractive to look for a method that would give me a little more confidence in what we were doing," Banerjee said at a Monday press conference at MIT.
That method was randomized control trials. Banerjee and another economist, Esther Duflo, started experimenting.
Their MIT colleague Ben Olken said their work changed the field of economics in developing countries.
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