They returned to Turkey, and he spent his early childhood in Ankara, where his father, Aptullah Kuran, taught at Middle East Technical University.

The family moved to Istanbul in 1969, when the senior Kuran joined the faculty of Robert College, whose higher education side became Boğaziçi University in 1971.

[4] Kuran taught at University of Southern California between 1982 and 2007, where he held the King Faisal professorship in Islamic Thought and Culture from 1993 onwards.

He moved to Duke University in 2007, as Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies and with a joint appointment in the departments of Economics and Political Science.

Kuran was the founding editor of the University of Michigan Press book series Economics, Cognition, and Society (1989-2006).

Kuran coined the term preference falsification in a 1987 article to describe the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures.

[7] This 1995 book explains how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

[10] Kuran has used his theory to shed light on the persistence of East European communism despite its inefficiencies,[11] why India’s caste system has remained a powerful institution for millennia,[12] transformations of American race relations,[13] the aggravation of ethnic conflicts through a self-reinforcing process whereby ethnic symbols gain salience and practical significance,[14] (with Cass Sunstein) the eruption of mass hysteria over minor risks,[15] and American polarization.

[17] Subsequently, it failed to match the institutional transformation through which Western Europe vastly increased its capacity to pool resources, coordinate production, and conduct trade.

[19] The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East is Kuran’s broadest account of this thesis.

But patterns they fostered, including low trust in institutions, rampant corruption, and widespread nepotism, are impeding the region’s catch-up.

[27] Kuran’s research on the Middle East’s economic history draws on data collected from Istanbul’s Islamic court archives.

[28] Kuran’s research agenda has included exploring the origins, logic, and initiatives of Islamic economics, a doctrine that claims to offer an alternative to capitalism and socialism.

[45] With a focus on the Middle East’s institutional history, Kuran has explored why its modern states tend to be governed autocratically and why the region fares poorly in global indices of freedom.

[47] And private commercial enterprises remained small and ephemeral, hindering the formation of stable coalitions capable of bargaining with the state.

[50] In the third category, his major collections are on the following topics: official revenue stamps and their usages; Ottoman occupations; foreign occupations of Ottoman territories; private and semi-official social assistance; printing, the press, and publishing; banking and insurance; political organizations; education; and lotteries.