Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson:the identification of historically contingent causal effects

In 2024, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson (AJR) received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. These three scholars were recognized “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” This paper reviews the contributions of these three scholars to our understanding of the institutional causes of historical and contemporary economic development. We place their work in the context of the intellectual history of the fields of economics and economic history: these authors pioneered the quantitative analysis of historical natural experiments to identify the causal effects of political institutions. We then discuss a less widely discussed contribution of their work: the identification of historically contingent causal effects. Historical contingency, we argue, is at the heart of AJR’s conceptual and empirical insights. These insights clarify transformative processes in historical development, including: (i) European colonialism; (ii) the Atlantic Trade; and, (iii) the French Revolution. More generally, they have implications for how we think about the path-dependence of political institutions and economic development: history has a long shadow, but that shadow shifts over time.