Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu won the John Bates Clark Medal, the prize given each other year to the greatest economist under the age of 40, which is a good indicator of who will win the Nobel Prize in Economics in the future.

I knew this news by visiting LSE's Economics Department website (see the NEWS section). LSE seems to be proud of him as he's the first former LSE PhD student winning this prize.

The award is given by the American Economic Association, whose website describes Professor Acemoglu's contributions.

What's weird to me is that this description only very briefly mentions yet another big contribution Acemoglu does to the field of political economy. He, along with James Robinson, came up with an economic theory of democratization, which is succinctly summarised in Chapter 2 of their forthcoming book. (See 18th January 2005 in my blog archives for the discussion on their theory.)

I believe this work also deserves a lot of attention.