Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for research on alleviating global poverty.

The trio pioneered an approach to poverty reduction that was based on carefully designed experiments that sought answers to specific policy questions.

Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the youngest person and second woman to be awarded the prize. Banerjee is also a professor at MIT.

Kremer, a professor at Harvard, used field work to test how school results could be improved in western Kenya during the mid-1990s.

“This year’s laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty,” organizers said in a statement.