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About James
James A. Robinson is a University Professor and the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, with appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science. A prominent scholar in Business & Economics, he also serves as Faculty Director of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He earned his BSc (Econ) from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1982, MA from the University of Warwick in 1986, and PhD from Yale University in 1993. Robinson's academic career prior to the University of Chicago includes faculty positions at Harvard University from 2004 to 2015 in various professorships, the University of California at Berkeley from 1999 to 2004 as Assistant and Associate Professor of Political Science and Economics, the University of Southern California from 1995 to 1999 as Assistant Professor of Economics, and the University of Melbourne from 1992 to 1995 as Lecturer in Economics.
An economist and political scientist, Robinson's research examines political and economic development, the relationships between political power, institutions, and prosperity, and the causes of economic and political divergence historically and today. His major publications include Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012, co-authored with Daron Acemoglu; translated into 41 languages), Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (2006, with Acemoglu), and The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty (2019, with Acemoglu). Influential papers comprise "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation" (2001, American Economic Review, with Acemoglu and Simon Johnson) and "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution" (2002, Quarterly Journal of Economics). In 2024, he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Acemoglu and Johnson for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. Other honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), Fellow of the Econometric Society (2021), the Carlos F. Díaz-Alejandro Prize (2018), and multiple honorary doctorates. Robinson has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, and taught summer schools at the University of the Andes in Bogotá from 1994 to 2022.