Research Interests for Timur Kuran

Timur Kuran’s research spans the fields of political science, economics, history, and legal studies. He has written on the economic history and modernization of the Middle East, economic development in general, the political economy of social values, religion and economics, preference falsification, the dynamics of revolutions, cascades, and cultural evolution. For the past decade his primary project has been to explain why the Middle East, once an economically advanced region of the world, subsequently failed to match the institutional transformation through which western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate productive activities, and conduct exchanges. Several mechanisms contributed to the Middle East’s economic retardation, his publications on the subject (including a book to be published in 2010) show. Certain distinctly Middle Eastern institutions, including ones rooted in Islam, unintentionally blocked the transition to the modern economy. The institutions that generated evolutionary bottlenecks include: (1) the Islamic law of inheritance, whose egalitarian character inhibited capital accumulation, (2) the strict individualism of Islamic law and its lack of a concept of corporation, which hindered organizational development and contributed to keeping civil society weak, and (3) the waqf, Islam’s distinct form of trust, which locked vast resources into inflexible organizations that tended to become dysfunctional over time. None of these institutions posed an economic disadvantage at the time of their emergence. Nor did they ever cause an absolute decline in economic activity. They turned into handicaps by perpetuating themselves during the long period when western Europe took the lead in developing the institutions of the modern economy. Kuran has recently taken up the puzzle of why most Middle Eastern countries are governed autocratically.

Representative Publications

1. Timur Kuran, Explaining the Economic Trajectories of Civilizations: The Systemic Approach, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 71 (2009), pp. 593-605 [abs]
2. Timur Kuran, The Scale of Entrepreneurship in Middle Eastern History: Inhibitive Roles of Islamic Institutions, in Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Economic History, edited by William J. Baumol, David S. Landes, and Joel Mokyr (2010), pp. 62-87, Princeton University Press, Princeton
3. Timur Kuran and William Sandholm, Cultural Integration and Its Discontents, Review of Economic Studies, vol. 75 (2008), pp. 201-228
4. Timur Kuran, The Absence of the Corporation in Islamic Law: Origins and Persistence, American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 53 (2005), pp. 785-834
5. Timur Kuran, The Logic of Financial Westernization in the Middle East, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 56 (2005), pp. 593-615
6. Timur Kuran, Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (2004), Princeton University Press [abs]
7. Timur Kuran, The Islamic Commercial Crisis: Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East, Journal of Economic History, vol. 63 (2003), pp. 414-446
8. Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995), Harvard University Press