James A. Robinson

James A. Robinson was born in the United Kingdom and spent some of his childhood in the Caribbean, where his father worked as an engineer. Impacted by the blackouts and labor strikes of 1970s Britain, as well as his politically engaged mother, Robinson began teaching himself economics in high school. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in England, he moved to the United States to pursue a PhD at Yale University.

Robinson subsequently conducted fieldwork around the world, studying the development and economics of countries like Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022.

This laid the foundation for Robinson’s pioneering work on political and economic development and the relationship between political power, institutions, and prosperity. He is now University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and department of political science at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as director for the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts.

“What I try to get across to students is just to think about the world,” he told the Nobel Prize committee. “Most of our work comes from just looking at the world and asking why is the world like that? Why does that happen? What on earth explains that? That makes it real. It’s not looking at each other’s navels.”

He has collaborated extensively with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, including coauthoring the landmark books Why Nations Fail, The Narrow Corridor, and Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. In 2024, Robinson shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Acemoglu and Simon Johnson for their research on how institutions are formed and shape prosperity. He was also named a Carnegie Scholar in 2002.

Published June 2026