James A. Robinson is a University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Professor Robinson studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick and Yale University. He previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Southern California, andhe was a Professor in the Departments of Economics and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. His main research interest is why countries are different: particularly why some are more prosperous than others and why some are more democratic than others.

Robinson is a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s program on Institutions, Organizations and Growth, and is co-author, with Daron Acemoglu, of Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, 2005) and of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, again with Acemoglu, in 2012.