Co-directors · The Growth Academy

Co-director

Ufuk Akcigit

Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics, The University of Chicago

Deputy Chief Economist and Director of Private Markets, World Bank Group

Ufuk Akcigit is the Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Growth Academy at the University of Chicago. He is widely recognized for his research on economic growth, innovation, and firm dynamics, and he is regularly consulted by major international institutions on these topics.

He served as Academic Lead for the World Development Report 2024, which examines the middle-income trap, and as Co-Academic Lead for the World Development Report 2026 on AI and development. He is also a Lead Academic Advisor and Board Member of the World Bank's Institute for Economic Development, and a member of the IMF Managing Director's Advisory Council on Entrepreneurship and Growth.

His contributions have been recognized with several major honors, including the Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science (2025), the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award (2021), the Kiel Institute Global Economy Prize (2022), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Research Award (2015), among several others. He is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and an elected member of the Turkish Science Academy.

Akcigit's research has appeared in leading journals, shaping current thinking on productivity, innovation policy, economic mobility, and cross-country growth. He earned his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Somik V. Lall

Director of Strategy, Office of the World Bank Group Chief Economist

Director, World Development Report 2024: The Middle-Income Trap

Somik V. Lall is Director of Strategy in the Office of the World Bank Group Chief Economist and a co-founder of the Growth Academy, the joint initiative of the World Bank and the University of Chicago. Across two decades at the World Bank he has shaped how the institution thinks about cities, productivity, and the geography of growth.

He directed the 2024 World Development Report on the middle-income trap, which asks how middle-income countries can join the ranks of the wealthiest economies. He has held leadership positions across the World Bank Group, including Senior Adviser to the Chief Economist, Acting Director of Development Policy, Head of the Climate Economics team, and Global Lead in the Sustainable Development and Infrastructure practices.

Lall teaches at Johns Hopkins University and has been a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi. He has served as Senior Economic Counselor to the Government of India.

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