Nobel Prize in economics awarded to UChicago professor and two others

James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics Monday along with two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The three received the award for their work on the differences in prosperity among nations, and the role institutions play in economic progress.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a news release.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shared the award with Robinson.

Robinson, who has spent decades researching and writing about the subject, said his initial reaction was one of “disbelief” when he received the news early Monday.

“I was sleeping with my phone off,” Robinson said at a news conference Monday. “So my wife woke me up and said, ‘You have to get up. … You won the Nobel Prize.’ I thought she was kidding.”

Breaking new ground at the intersection of economics and politics, Robinson and his colleagues found that the societal institutions formed during European colonization had a lasting impact on the wealth and prosperity of nations, based on whether they included or exploited the indigenous population.

That historical perspective provides a potential causal reason as to why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty.

“I’m not just an economist, I’m a political scientist too, because then the world starts getting much more complicated when you think about the politics,” Robinson said. “But for us, that’s the challenge in creating prosperity out of poverty.”

The British-born Robinson, 64, spent much of his childhood in the Caribbean nations of Barbados and Trinidad, following his engineer father’s work overseas and cultivating a lifelong interest in divergent prosperity around the world, with a focus on poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

In 2012, Robinson and Acemoglu published “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” a seminal, deeply researched work that brought the historical melding of politics and economics to a wider audience.

“I cannot overstate the way in which it changed the intellectual agenda in the study of politics and economics,” Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, dean at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said Monday. “A generation of scholars were influenced by that work.”

The university has long been fertile academic ground for Nobel laureates.

Robinson is the 101st scholar associated with the University of Chicago to receive a Nobel Prize, and the 34th to receive the Nobel in economics, according to the university. In addition to Robinson, seven current UChicago faculty members are Nobel laureates in economics.

The most recent winner, Douglas Diamond, a finance professor, shared the award in 2022 for his research on banks and financial crises.

Robinson received his Ph.D. from Yale University, his master’s from the University of Warwick and his bachelor’s from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 2015. Before that, Robinson taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University.

Robinson is the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science. He is also the institute director of UChicago’s Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts.

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