The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential female people in Economics,

#201

Graciela Kaminsky

#62939
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Graciela Kaminsky is a professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kaminsky studied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she received her Ph.D. In 1984 she did a brief research stay at the Argentine Central Bank, later in 1985 she moved to San Diego as an assistant professor at the University of California. In 1992 she worked on the board of governors of the US Federal Reserve System, later in 1998 she was appointed a full professor at George Washington University, where she works at the Elliot School of International Affairs.
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#202

Dambisa Moyo, Baroness Moyo

Dambisa Moyo, Baroness Moyo
#45934
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dambisa Felicia Moyo, Baroness Moyo is a Zambian-born economist and author, known for her analysis of macroeconomics and global affairs. She has written five books, including four New York Times bestsellers: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa , How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead , Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World , Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – and How to Fix It , and How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a...
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#203

Kathryn L. Shaw

#62564
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kathryn L. Shaw is the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Previously, she was the Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Economics at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. From 1999-2001, she served as a Senate-confirmed Member of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.
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#204

Elise Brezis

Elise Brezis
#38140
Overall Influence
Elise Scheiner Brezis, professor of economics at Bar-Ilan University, is the director of the Azrieli Center for Economic Policy. She has been the head of the Statistics division at the Research Department in the Bank of Israel, and from 1999 to 2003, she was the president of the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration. She holds a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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#205

Anne Mills

Anne Mills
#40157
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dame Anne Jane Mills, is a British authority on health economics. She is deputy director and Provost and Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
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#206

Suzanne Scotchmer

#38979
Overall Influence
1950 - 2014 (64 years)
Suzanne Scotchmer was an American professor of law, economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and also a noted author on many economic subjects. She earned her B.A. from University of Washington magna cum laude in 1970, her M.A. in statistics from UC Berkeley in 1979, and her PhD in economics from UC Berkeley in 1980.
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#207

Adriana Kugler

Adriana Kugler
#44814
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Adriana Debora Kugler is an American economist who serves as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She previously served as U.S. executive director at the World Bank, nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 2022. She is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and is currently on leave from her tenured position at Georgetown. She served as the Chief Economist to U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis from September 6, 2011 to January 4, 2013.
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#208

Laura Gardini

#52198
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Laura Gardini is an Italian mathematician who studies chaos in dynamical systems, with applications in mathematical finance. She is professor in mathematics for economic applications at the University of Urbino.
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#209

Heleen Mees

Heleen Mees
#28565
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Heleen Mees is a Dutch opinion writer, economist, and lawyer. Involved with politics and public policy in the Netherlands and the US, she has also taught at universities in both countries. Biography Mees graduated in Economy and Law at University of Groningen. From 1992 to 1998, she worked for the Dutch Treasury in The Hague, for two years as spokeswoman for former State Secretary Willem Vermeend. She then worked for the European Commission in Brussels from 1998 to 2000. In 2000 she emigrated to the US, where she changed her surname from Nijkamp to Mees.
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#210

Alice Nakamura

#64809
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alice Orcutt Nakamura is an American-Canadian economist and writer. She is a fellow of the Canadian Economics Association, which is the highest honour of the association. She is currently a professor of finance and management science at the University of Alberta where she has taught since 1972. Alice Nakamura was also the first female president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1994–1995. She was also the president of the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth from 2014 to 2016.
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#211

Clair Brown

Clair Brown
#57009
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Clair Brown is an American economist who is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown is a past Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at UC Berkeley. Brown has published research on many aspects of how economies function, including high-tech industries, development engineering, the standard of living, wage determination, poverty, and unemployment.
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#212

Phyllis Ann Wallace

#58992
Overall Influence
1921 - 1993 (72 years)
Phyllis A. Wallace was a distinguished African-American economist and activist, as well as the first woman to receive doctorate of economics at Yale University. Her work tended to focus on racial, as well as gender discrimination in the workplace.She mentored many students and colleagues.
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#213

Elizabeth Bailey

#37875
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Elizabeth Ellery Bailey was an American economist. She was the John C. Hower Professor of Business and Public Policy, at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Bailey studied deregulation, market competition and regulatory capture through her career and contributed to the deregulation of the airline industry in the United States in the late 1970s.
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#214

Muriel Niederle

#65007
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Muriel Niederle is a professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. Niederle teaches courses at Stanford University focusing specifically on experimental economics and market design. Muriel Niederle is interested in studying behavioral and experimental economics. Niederle's most recent publication was "Probabilistic States versus Multiple Certainties: The Obstacle of Uncertainty in Contingent Reasoning" in November 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017.
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#215

Leigh Tesfatsion

#53976
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Leigh Tesfatsion is a computational economist who taught at Iowa State University. She received her doctorate at the University of Minnesota, and taught at the University of Southern California before moving to Iowa State. She is known for promoting agent-based models as an alternative to rational expectations general equilibrium models for studying markets, finance, and macroeconomic phenomena. Her works are widely cited in the literature on the subject.
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#216

Antonina Kravchuk

#52623
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Antonina Mykhailivna Kravchuk is a former First Lady of Ukraine. Biography Antonina Mykhailivna Mishura was born in the village of Vyry Bilopillia Raion, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine SSR on November 3, 1935. In 1958, she graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. PhD in Economics.
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#217

Roberta Romano

#26519
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roberta Romano is Sterling Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. She is the first woman at Yale Law School to be named a Sterling Professor. Roberta Romano joined the Yale Law School faculty as a professor of law in 1985. She was named the Allen Duffy/Class of 1960 Professor of Law in 1991 and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law in 2005. She is Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law and Professor at the Yale School of Management.
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#218

Gülnur Muradoğlu

#65440
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Gülnur Muradoğlu , is a Turkish, naturalised British professor of behavioural finance at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, director of Ph.D. programmes at Cass Business School . Muradoğlu has also worked for Manchester School of Accounting and Finance as the Director of the MSc. Finance Program and for Bilkent University as assistant and associate professor respectively. She has been at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbrighter and Warwick Business School as a visiting fellow.
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#219

Carol Propper

#33642
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Dame Carol Propper is Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School, Professor of Economics of Public Policy at Bristol University, and Professor of Health Economics at Monash University. She is also a senior research associate with the Nuffield Trust, and has served on the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grants Board.
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#220

Dina Pomeranz

#75302
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Dina Deborah Pomeranz is a Swiss economist and assistant professor of applied economics at University of Zurich. Pomeranz is considered to be one of the most influential Swiss economists. Education Pomeranz grew up in Zürich, where she graduated from high school. She studied international relations at the University of Geneva and obtained her master's degree from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in 2004. In 2010 she received her PhD in economics from Harvard University with the dissertation Essays on Tax Evasion and Savings: Evidence from Three Randomi...
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#221

Linda Tesar

#70304
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Linda L. Tesar is a professor of economics and director of graduate studies at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts , the liberal arts and sciences school of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Editor-in-Chief of the IMF Economic Review. She has been a visitor in the Research Departments of the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. In the past, she has also served on the academic advisory council to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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#222

Anne van Aaken

#40050
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Anne Sophia-Marie van Aaken is a German lawyer and economist, who is a full professor of law and economics, legal theory, public international law and European law at the University of Hamburg. Life Van Aaken completed her Abitur in Bonn. From 1987 to 1992 she studied economics with the degree of Lic. pole. and communication sciences with the degree dipl. journ. at the University of Friborg and then from 1992 to 1997 law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There she graduated in 1997 with a first state examination First Juristische Staatsexamen. Van Aaken was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University in 1997 and 1998.
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#223

Jennifer Roback Morse

#32883
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jennifer Roback Morse is an economist, a writer and a Catholic social conservative. She is the president and founder of the Ruth Institute, which was formed as an affiliated of the same-sex marriage opposition group National Organization for Marriage.
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#224

Ruth Towse

#72144
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ruth Towse FRSA is a British economist and Professor of Economics of Creative Industries at Bournemouth University and Professor Emerita at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. A leading authority in cultural economics with a particular emphasis on the economics of media and copyright, she has taught in UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Thailand universities. She was married to Mark Blaug.
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#225

Laura Veldkamp

#71356
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Laura Veldkamp is an American economist teaching as a professor of finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and also serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Economic Theory. Education Veldkamp graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Math and Economics from Northwestern University in 1996. She then received her Ph.D. in Economic Analysis and Policy from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2001.
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#226

Kshama Sawant

#17612
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Kshama Sawant is an Indian-American politician and economist who has served on the Seattle City Council since 2014. She is a member of Socialist Alternative, the first and only member of the party to date to be elected to public office.
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#227

Alicia Munnell

Alicia Munnell
#47251
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Alicia Haydock Munnell is an American economist who is the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College's Carroll School of Management. Educated at Wellesley College, Boston University, and Harvard University, Munnell spent 20 years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she researched wealth, savings, and retirement among American workers. She served in the Bill Clinton administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. Since 1997 she has been a professor at Boston College...
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#228

Reinhilde Veugelers

#78963
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Reinhilde Veugelers is a Belgian economist and Professor of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from Belgium, known for her research on science and innovation. She is also a scholar at Bruegel in Brussels and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington D.C.
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#229

Lorin Hitt

#67604
Overall Influence
Lorin M. Hitt is an American economist, currently the Zhang Jingdong Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Bibliography
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#230

Margaret A. Meyer

#79546
Overall Influence
Margaret Ann Meyer is an American economist whose research interests include microeconomics, organizational economics, and contract theory. She works in England as an Official Fellow in economics in Nuffield College, Oxford.
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#231

Rosa Matzkin

#90283
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rosa Matzkin is an economist who is the Charles E. Davidson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2018 Matzkin was awarded membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She works in the fields of econometrics and microeconomic theory, including panel data models and the study of economic decision-making.
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#232

Şemsa Özar

#77119
Overall Influence
Şemsa Özar is a professor in the Department of Economics at Boğaziçi University, Turkey and past president of the International Association for Feminist Economics , her tenure was 2015 to 2016. Education Özar gained her degree and masters from Boğaziçi University in Turkey in 1977 and 1978 respectively. Her post-graduate degree came from the Institute for Advanced Studies and Scientific Research, Vienna in 1988 and her PhD came from the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Austria in 1990. Her PhD thesis title was: The Effects of the IMF-Supported Programs on Income Distribution: Turkey as a Case.
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#233

Sandra Black

Sandra Black
#59578
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sandra Eilene Black is a Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Since that time, she worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as an assistant, associate, and ultimately full professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA before arriving at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research , a research affiliate at IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution.
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#234

Aušra Maldeikienė

#44018
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Aušra Seibutytė-Maldeikienė is a Lithuanian political economist, politician, lecturer, teacher, publicist and book author. In 2019 she was elected to the European Parliament, having previously sat as a member of the Seimas since 2016 and Vilnius City Council .
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#235

Marilda Sotomayor

#42513
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marilda A. Oliveira Sotomayor is a Brazilian mathematician and economist known for her research on auction theory and stable matchings. She is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Brazilian Society of Econometrics, and Brazilian Society of Mathematics. She was elected fellow of the Econometric Society in 2003 and international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
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#236

Petra Todd

#60926
Overall Influence
Petra Elisabeth Todd is an American economist whose research interests include labor economics, development economics, microeconomics, and econometrics. She is the Edward J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and is also affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, the Human Capital and Equal Opportunity Global Working Group , the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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#237

Eliana Cardoso

#80602
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Eliana Anastasia Cardoso is a professor of economics at the São Paulo School of Economics. She worked at both the World Bank and the IMF. She holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master from the Universidade de Brasília.
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#238

Katharine Abraham

Katharine Abraham
#54944
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Katharine G. Abraham is an American economist who is the director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, and a professor of survey methodology and economics at the University of Maryland. She was commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993–2001 and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011–2013. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
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#239

Bridget Terry Long

#46000
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Bridget Terry Long is the 12th Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Saris Professor of Education and Economics. She is an economist whose research focuses on college access and success. Long is a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Education.
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#240

Mary Amiti

#78148
Overall Influence
Mary Amiti is an Australian economist and a Vice President of the Microeconomic Studies Function at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. During her career, she worked at the World Bank, IMF and various universities before joining the Federal Reserve in 2006. She is a research associate at the CEPR.
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#241

Sherry Glied

#49302
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sherry A. Glied is a Canadian-American economist, currently serving as the Dean of New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. From 2010 to 2012, she served as Assistant Secretary at the United States Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration.
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#242

Teresa Ghilarducci

#54378
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Teresa Ghilarducci is an American scholar on labor and retirement issues. She has advocated for government to extend occupational retirement plan coverage to all workers. She published Rescuing Retirement in 2018; the book makes the case for a Guaranteed Retirement Account that would supplement Social Security. In 2016 she wrote a popular book, How to Retire with Enough Money: And How to Know What Enough Is. One of her most recent books, When I’m Sixty Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, investigates the loss of pensions on older Americans and proposes a comprehensive system of reform.
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#243

Anne Carter

#63125
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Anne Pitts Carter is an American educator and economist, specializing in technical change and technology transfer. Life The daughter of Jacob J. Pitts, she was born Anne Pitts in New York City. She completed a bachelor's degree at Queens College and pursued graduate studies at Harvard University although, due to the conventions of the time, she was enrolled through Radcliffe College. In 1946, she married Robert Grosse, also a graduate student in economics. While she was working on her PhD thesis at Harvard, she taught part-time at Bates College and was professor of economics at Brooklyn College; she received her PhD in 1949.
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#244

Séverine Deneulin

#50632
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Séverine Marie Paule Deneulin is a senior lecturer in International Development at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, and a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association ; she is also the HDCA's secretary with a place on the executive council.
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#245

Robin L. Bartlett

#72508
Overall Influence
Robin L. Bartlett is a professor of economics at Denison University. She was among the founders of the International Association for Feminist Economics , and served as its president from 2005 to 2006.
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#246

Lorraine Dearden

#68337
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lorraine Margaret Dearden is an Australo-British economist and professor of economics and social statistics at the Department of Social Science of the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research focuses on the economics of education.
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#247

Kala Krishna

#79541
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kala Krishna is an Indian -American economist, currently Liberal Arts Research Professor of Economics at Pennsylvania State University., an NBER Research Associate and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. Her research is in the areas of international trade, economics of education, development economics and industrial organization.
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#248

Edith Kuiper

#86944
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Edith Kuiper is the assistant professor of economics at State University of New York at New Paltz, and she was the president of the International Association for Feminist Economics from 2006 to 2007.
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#249

Monika Schnitzer

#73150
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Monika Schnitzer is a German economist and chair of comparative economic research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She was the president of the Verein für Socialpolitik from 2015 to 2016 and is the chairwoman of the German Council of Economic Experts since 2022.
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#250

Judith Sloan

#46983
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Judith Sloan is an Australian economist. Sloan was born in Melbourne. She has been teaching as a university professor at Flinders University and the Curtin Institute of Technology and is an honorary professorial fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research of the University of Melbourne. She served as a commissioner on the Australian government's Productivity Commission and the Australian Fair Pay Commission, and she was deputy chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is a former board director of the Lowy Institute.
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