Tuesday, May 26, 2026 - 11:00
Professor James Robinson is a prominent economist and political scientist. Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, Prof. Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences. Prof. Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He has published several articles and three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, a Professor of Economics at MIT who also obtained the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. The first, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a theory of the emergence of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty, examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world. He currently holds appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Political Science department at the University of Chicago.
Professor Frank Hahn (Birmingham, London School of Economics, Cambridge, Siena) has been acknowledged, worldwide, as a leading economic theorist of the previous century. He gave fundamental contributions to the theory of economic equilibrium and to the role of money in the economy. He also became known for having promoted a letter, signed by more than 300 economists, critical of the Margaret Thatcher economic policy. In his career he has mentored numerous economists, currently leading international academics. He had close collaborations with some of the principal world figures of the Economics discipline. During his period in Siena, he gave fundamental contributions to the University PhD program in Economics, and to many scientific activities of the Economics Department
