Dani Rodrik

Dani Rodrik (born August 14, 1957) is a Turkish economist and Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was formerly the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of the Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has published widely in the areas of international economics, economic development, and political economy. The question of what constitutes good economic policy and why some governments are more successful than others at adopting it is at the center of his research. His works include Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science and The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. He is also joint editor-in-chief of the academic journal Global Policy.

Rodrik is descended from a family of Sephardic Jews.

After graduating from Robert College in Istanbul, he obtained an A.B. degree (summa cum laude) in Government and Economics from Harvard College in 1979. He then earned an M.P.A. degree (with distinction) from Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in 1981 and a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Princeton University in 1985, with the thesis titled Studies on the Welfare Theory of Trade and Exchange-rate Policy.

He had also been writing for the now defunct Turkish daily Radikal 2009–2016.

He joined the newly created World Economics Association as a member of the executive committee in 2011.

He is married to Pınar Doğan, a lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the daughter of Turkish retired General Çetin Doğan who was acquitted of an aggravated life imprisonment for his alleged involvement in the alleged Sledgehammer coup plan.

As a scholar, he is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), Center for Global Development, Institute for International Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and is co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation. Among other honors, he was presented the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2002 from the Global Development and Environment Institute.

On 8 November 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University Rotterdam.