James A. Robinson shares 2024 Nobel Prize for research on global inequality

Economist becomes 101st scholar associated with UChicago to receive Nobel Prize

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By Tori Lee

Prof. James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago has been awarded the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science, for his research on “how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” He shared this year’s prize with Profs. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT.

Robinson is the 101st scholar associated with the University to receive a Nobel Prize, and the 34th to receive the Nobel in economics. In addition to Robinson, seven current UChicago faculty members are Nobel laureates in economics: Prof. Douglas Diamond (who won in 2022), Prof. Michael Kremer (2019), Prof. Richard Thaler (2017), Profs. Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen (2013), Prof. Roger Myerson (2007) and Prof. James Heckman (2000).

An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. Robinson is the institute director of UChicago’s Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He has conducted fieldwork around the world including Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. 

Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson are honored for work that aims to trace the historical roots of an age-old question: Why are some countries poorer and others prosperous? And why do these inequalities persist? Using both empirical and theoretical approaches the scholars have achieved, according to the Nobel committee, “a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.”

Specifically, Robinson, Acemoglu and Johnson study how economic and political institutions can cause these extreme income gaps. To do this the scholars traced wide swaths of history, starting in the 16th century when European colonization of a large part of the world caused new institutions to spring up. The differences between how these institutions operate, whether they are extractive or inclusive, have had huge implications for the long-term future prosperity of a nation.

Robinson is widely recognized as the co-author of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), along with Acemoglu. Translated into 41 languages since its publication, the book offers a unique historic exploration of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. He has also written and co-authored numerous books and articles, including the acclaimed Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy(2005) and The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty (2019, also with Acemoglu).

Robinson received his Ph.D. from Yale University, his master’s degree from the University of Warwick and his bachelor’s from the London School of Economics and Political science. Before joining the UChicago faculty, he previously taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University.