Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu is currently Charles. P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began as an Assistant Professor there in 1993.

He is a Research Associate of both the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Prof. Acemoglu is also Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and of National Bureau of Economic Research Macroeconomic Annual, and a Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic Growth and the Journal of Economic Literature.

Prof. Acemoglu has received numerous honours and awards for his work. In 2004, he was awarded the inaugural T.W. Shultz Prize for exceptional work by an economist in early or mid-career and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for the most important contribution to labour economics by an economist within the first 12 years after their Ph.D. In 2005, The American Economic Association has awarded the John Bates Clark Award (considered one of the two most prestigious awards in the field of economics ) for the most promising economist under 40 to Daron Acemoglu. Eleven of the 29

Eleven of the 29 economists who have received the John Bates Clark Award have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In 2006, he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and won the Turkish-American Scientists and Scholars Association‘s Turkish Science Award. In 2007, he was awarded the John von Neumann Prize by the Rajk Lazlo College for Advanced Studies from the University of Budapest.

Prof. Acemoglu’s width of interests makes him a leading scholar in different fields. Daron Acemoglu is said to be an extremely broad and productive economist, who made valuable contributions to several distinct fields, starting with labor economics, and successively moving to macroeconomics, institutional economics, and political economy.

His most recent work on the role of institutions in development and in political economy is especially innovative, and has already had a large impact on research in these areas. Acemoglu’s research has explored the role that social and political institutions play in the economic development of nations around the world. His work suggests that institutions are more important to a nation’s economic success than rich endowments of resources or geographic location.

Although Daron Acemoglu is primarily a theorist, his work is always motivated by real-world questions that arise when facts are difficult to reconcile with existing theory.