James Robinson

institutional political economy (with Acemoglu).

Professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, where he researches comparative political economy and development. His decades of collaboration with Acemoglu produced landmark papers on colonial origins of comparative development and the books *Why Nations Fail* (2012) and *The Narrow Corridor* (2019). His framework argues that political institutions, not geography or culture, are the primary driver of long-run economic divergence.