From Yale Ph.D. to Nobel laureate in economics

When economist James A. Robinson ’93 Ph.D. won the Nobel Prize this week, he reflected on the lasting influence of his thesis advisor at Yale.
James A. Robinson

James A. Robinson ’93 Ph.D. (AP Photo)

After learning that he had been awarded the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences this week, the first person James A. Robinson ’93 Ph.D. texted was Truman Bewley, who was his thesis advisor at Yale more than 30 years ago.

It’s funny how these things take time for you to realize, but I realized how much of my attitude towards social science and research I got from being Truman’s student,” Robinson, an economist and political scientist, said during a news conference on Monday at the University of Chicago, where he is the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies.

For his part, Bewley was excited to learn of his former student’s achievement. 

It was quite a thrill,” said Bewley, the Alfred C. Cowles Professor Emeritus of Economics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “James was very much part of our family… My wife started to cry when she heard the news because we liked him so much.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Robinson for his work demonstrating the importance of societal institutions to a country’s prosperity. He shared the prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who are both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his co-authors on a series of studies that have used empirical and theoretical approaches to examine how institutions are formed and affect whether a country succeeds of fails.  

The laureates have shown that one explanation for differences in countries’ prosperity is the societal institutions that were introduced during colonization,” the committee said in announcing this year’s recipients. “Inclusive institutions were often introduced in countries that were poor when they were colonized, over time resulting in a generally prosperous population. This is an important reason for why former colonies that were once rich are now poor, and vice versa.”

Robinson discussed his work in a December 2019 episode of the Big Brains podcast, which is produced by the University of Chicago Podcast Network, after the release of his book, “The Narrow Corridor,” co-authored by Acemoglu, which describes the factors necessary to create a prosperous nation.  

I think that whether or not a nation succeeds or fails depends on how the people in that society themselves organize that society, organize the institutions, the rules that create different patterns of incentives and opportunities,” he said during the conversation.

When Robinson was a Ph.D. student at Yale, Bewley recalled, the future Nobel laureate was “bubbling over with ideas.”  

He was always thinking of something,” he said. “He is a very interesting person to talk to. I think I got more out of him than he got out of me. It was quite a privilege to have him as a student.”

Although the subject of Robinson’s dissertation, “The Dynamic Enforcement of Implicit Labor Contracts Under Asymmetric Information,” is unrelated to the research track that earned him the Nobel Prize, he would, as a student, often discuss topics concerning the age-old question of why some countries fail while others prosper, Bewley said.

What he did in the way of research afterwards were the kinds of things that he’d talk to me about,” he said.

Bewley said that Robinson supported him as he researched his 1999 book, “Why Wages Don’t Fall During a Recession,” which was based on hundreds of interviews with executives, labor leaders, and other professionals.

He would tell me about literature relevant to that project,” Bewley said. “He read and read and read. He read things related to what I was working on and to ideas that he was interested in. He is a master of literature.”

Robinson is the third Yale-trained Nobel laureate in economics in the past three years, joining Douglas W. Diamond ’80 Ph.D. and Philip H. Dybvig ’79 Ph.D., who shared the prize in 2022 for their work on bank runs. The latter two met while Ph.D. students at Yale.

Two Yale faculty members — William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at FAS, and Robert Shiller, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics — have also won Nobel prizes in economics in recent years. Nordhaus was honored in 2018, and Shiller in 2013.

The Department of Economics is happy to congratulate James Robinson on being awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, alongside his co-authors, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson,” said Department Chair Tony Smith, the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics and of Management.

One of the department’s hallmarks is its rigorous and high-quality training in cutting-edge economics research, and we are proud that since 2022, three of our graduates have received Nobel Prizes.”

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