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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Economics,
#251
Michele Bullock
#27945
Overall Influence
Michele Bullock is an Australian economist who is currently governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia . She commenced as governor on 18 September 2023, and is the first woman to hold the role. Early life, personal life and education Bullock was born in 1962 or 1963 in Melbourne. At approximately nine years of age, she moved to Armidale, New South Wales, where she attended Armidale High School.
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Małgorzata Zaleska
#84848
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Małgorzata Zaleska is a Polish economist who is currently a professor of economic sciences, the chairman of the committee on finance of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the director of the Institute of Banking at the Warsaw School of Economics. She served as the president of the Warsaw Stock Exchange , after serving as the member of the board of the National Bank of Poland and the president of the Bank Guarantee Fund in Poland .
Go to Profile#253
Melissa Kearney
#66006
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Melissa Schettini Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research . She is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities ; and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab . She has been an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy since 2019 and of the Journal of Economic Literature since 2017.
Go to Profile#254
Jennifer F. Reinganum
#50645
Overall Influence
Jennifer F. Reinganum is an American economist. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she is the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. She has been a professor of economics since 1995. Reinganum was the president of the American Law and Economics Association for 2012 and has received multiple grant awards from the National Science Foundation.
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Toni Whited
#90500
Overall Influence
Toni Whited is the Dale L. Dykema Professor of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in economics and French from the University of Oregon in 1984 and then went on to receive her PhD in economics from Princeton University in 1990. She has taught in multiple areas including: finance, econometrics, and macroeconomics. In her work, she has also published over 30 articles in high level economics and finance journals. During her research she covers subjects such as corporate investment corporate cash policy, structural estimation...
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Julia Lane
#73832
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Julia Ingrid Lane is an economist and economic statistician who works as a professor at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, as well as NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress, helping CUSP to build CUSP data facility. Also, she works in NYU's GovLab as a Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics and Senior Fellow.
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Rita Klímová
#40415
Overall Influence
1931 - 1993 (62 years)
Rita Klímová, née Rita Budínová was a Czech economist and politician. She was Czechoslovakia's ambassador to the United States before that country's breakup in 1992. Early life Klímová was born in Romania. Her father was Stanislav Budín , a prominent Communist writer who used the pen name Batya Bat. Due to their Jewish ancestry, her family fled to the United States not long after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. She settled in New York City in 1939, returning to Czechoslovakia in 1946 to finish her education. As a result, for the rest of her life she spoke American English with an...
Go to Profile#258
Graciela Márquez Colín
#25890
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Graciela Márquez Colín is a Mexican academic and economist. She held the position of Mexican Minister of Economy from 2018–2020, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As of January 2021, she holds the position of Vice President of the Governing Board of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography . She is set to occupy this role for an eight-year term, until December 2028. Previously she was Professor of Economic History at the El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City where she was a full professor at the Centro de Estudios Historicos. She was also a Visiting Professor at the Univers...
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Kathryn M. Dominguez
#39093
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Kathryn Mary Elizabeth Dominguez is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan and is a former nominee for the Governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Early life and education Dominguez was born on November 26, 1960, in Los Angeles, California. She received her Artium Baccalaureus degree in 1982 from Vassar College. She received a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics in 1987 from Yale University. Prior to attaining her Ph.D., she served on the research staff of the Fiscal Analysis Division of the Congressional Budget Office during the summer of 1984 and as a ...
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Nathalie Elgrably-Lévy
#63713
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nathalie Elgrably-Lévy is an economics teacher and a writer. She holds an M.Sc. in Commerce from HEC Montréal, with a specialization in applied Economics and a thesis on the federal budget deficit. Elgrably-Lévy is primarily interested by the evaluation of public policy.
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Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#23783
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a Cambridge educated economist. Education Hewlett graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, was a Kennedy Scholar and then earned her PhD degree in economics at the University of London.
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Lee Badgett
#83670
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mary Virginia Lee Badgett is an American economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, best known for her research into economic issues relevant to lesbians, gay men, and their families. Badgett earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990. From 1990 to 1997 she was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1997 she joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2005 Badgett has also been the research director at...
Go to Profile#263
Anita Nyberg
#51287
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anita Nyberg is a Swedish professor emerita in Gender Perspectives in Work and Economics at the Centre for Gender Studies at Stockholm University. She was Secretary of the Swedish Committee on the Distribution of Economic Power and Economic Resources between Women and Men .
Go to Profile#264
Birgit Grodal
#67415
Overall Influence
1943 - 2004 (61 years)
Birgit Grodal , was an economics professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1968 until her death in 2004. Early life Birgit Grodal was born on 24 June 1943 in Copenhagen, Denmark. She grew up in Frederiksberg. She was the middle child having both a younger and an older brother. Grodal was interested in mathematics from a young age and used to fill the pages of her psalm book with equations. She was married to Torben Grodal.
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Martha Bailey
#87284
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Martha J. Bailey is a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. She was previously a professor of economics at the University of Michigan from 2007 to 2020, where she was the first woman internally promoted to tenure in that department. In November 2017, Bloomberg Businessweek named her someone to watch in 2018, because "Her research on the positive economic effects of contraception has influenced debates around h...
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Gillian Hadfield
#74319
Overall Influence
Gillian Kereldena Hadfield is a professor of law and of strategic management who is the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is also director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Previously, she was the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. At USC, Hadfield directed the Southern California Innovation Project and the USC Center in Law, Economics, and Organization. She is a former member of the board of directo...
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Alison Preston
#84014
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alison Preston is an Australian economist, Winthrop Professor of Economics at the University of Western Australia, and Deputy Dean of UWA Business School. She is an expert on wage determination and wages policy, the gender pay gap and segmentation and labour market structures.
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Pasuk Phongpaichit
#19544
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pasuk Phongpaichit is a Thai economist. A professor at Chulalongkorn University, she is the author of several books on corruption in Thailand. Pasuk earned BA and MA degrees in economics at Monash University in Australia, and received her PhD at Cambridge University in England. Her books include A History of Thailand, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, and Thailand's Crisis , and Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja .
Go to Profile#269
Sylvia Porter
#27085
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sylvia Field Porter was an American economist, journalist and author. At the height of her career, her readership was greater than 40 million people. Early life Porter was born in Patchogue, New York, on Long Island as Sylvia Field Feldman to Louis and Rose Maisel Feldman. Originally majoring in English literature, she switched to economics and finance given the impact of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It has been suggested that her fiancé, bank employee Reed Porter, was relying upon Sylvia to explain the complications of the worldwide financial panic. They were married in 1931.
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Ellen McGrattan
#88386
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ellen McGrattan is an American macroeconomist who is Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and past director of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute, and consults for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
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Usha Haley
#17590
Overall Influence
Usha C. V. Haley is an American author and academic, currently W. Frank Barton Distinguished Chair of International Business and Professor of Management at the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University in the U.S. state of Kansas. She is also Director of the Center for International Business Advancement at Wichita State University and elected Chair of the independent World Trade Council of Wichita. Prior to this, she was at other universities including West Virginia University, Massey University in New Zealand and at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University. Haley is cr...
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Elsa Fornero
#77220
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elsa Fornero is an Italian economist, university lecturer, and politician who served as Minister of Labour and Social Policies in the Monti Cabinet from November 2011 to April 2013. Early life and education Fornero was born in San Carlo Canavese, in the province of Turin, Piedmont, on 7 May 1948. Prior to becoming minister, she was professor of Political Economics at the School of Management and Economics of the University of Turin starting in 2000. She taught macroeconomics and the economics of savings, social security, and pension funds. Her scientific research focused on public and private...
Go to Profile#273
Barbara Wolfe
#94659
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Barbara Wolfe is an economist and the Richard A. Easterlin Professor of Economics, Population Health Sciences, and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Wolfe is also a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty. She is a research associate at the NBER, and the Levy Institute of Bard College. She is also an emeritus fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics .
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Judith Chevalier
#79068
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Judith Chevalier is the William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics at Yale University. She is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former co-editor of the American Economic Review and of the RAND Journal of Economics. In 1998, she was the first to receive the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.
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Marina Halac
#71614
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Marina Halac is a professor of economics at Yale University. She is also an associate editor of Econometrica and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review. She was the 2016 recipient of the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, which is awarded biennially by the American Economic Association to recognize outstanding research by a woman. She received this award within the first seven years after completing her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, she was named one of the "Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors" by Poets and Quants. She was a recipient of the George S.
Go to Profile#276
Barbara Harriss-White
#63376
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Harriss-White is an English economist and emeritus professor of development studies. She was trained in geography, agricultural science, agricultural economics and self-taught in development economics. In the 1990s, she helped to create the multi- and inter- disciplinary thematic discipline of development studies in Oxford Department of International Development; and in 2005-7 founded Oxford's Contemporary South Asia Programme. She has developed an approach to the understanding of Indian rural development and its informal economy, grounded in political economy and decades of what the ...
Go to Profile#277
Hilary Hoynes
#80689
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hilary Hoynes is an economist and Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. She studies the impact of tax and transfer programs on low-income families, particularly single parent families. She was the 2014 winner of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She has been a co-editor of the American Economic Review, co-editor of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Associate editor of Journal of Public Economics and Journal...
Go to Profile#278
Shirley Robin Letwin
#53969
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Shirley Robin Letwin was an American academic who lived in London. Biography Early life Shirley Robin Letwin was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Kiev. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she was taught by Friedrich Hayek, and did graduate studies at the London School of Economics. She decided to move to England permanently in 1965.
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Rhonda Sharp
#92335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rhonda Dawn Sharp , is an adjunct professor of economics at the University of South Australia and project team leader and chief researcher of the university's Hawke Research Institute and Research Centre for Gender Studies.
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Amelia Fletcher
#96678
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Amelia Fletcher is a British singer, songwriter, guitarist and economist. Music career Fletcher has been the frontwoman of an evolving series of pop groups from the 1980s to the present. Her bands included Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap, and, since 2014, The Catenary Wires. In 2020, she began a new band, Swansea Sound, with The Pooh Sticks's Hue Williams.
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Adriana Lleras-Muney
#27041
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Adriana Lleras-Muney is a Colombian-American economist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA. She was appointed as Associate Editor for the Journal of Health Economics in 2014, and she was elected as one of the six members of the American Economic Association Executive committee in 2018. Her research focuses on socio-economic status and health with a particular emphasis on education, income, and economic development. In 2017, she was received the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama.
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Margaret Gardner
#15791
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Margaret Elaine Gardner, is an Australian academic, economist and university executive serving as the 30th and current governor of Victoria since August 2023. She was previously the vice-chancellor of Monash University from 2014 to 2023 and the president and vice-chancellor of RMIT University from 2005 to 2014.
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Mara Faccio
#66929
Overall Influence
Mara Faccio is an economist and currently the Duke Realty Chair in Finance and Professor of Finance at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. She is a research associate at the NBER. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and the Journal of Corporate Finance. and previously held editorial positions at Financial Management magazine and The Review of Financial Studies.
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Erica Field
#90006
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Erica Marie Field is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University. Her research interests include development economics, labour economics, and health economics. In 2010, her research was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.
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Marie Claire Villeval
#98524
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Marie Claire Odile Villeval is a French economist and research professor in economics at the National Center for Scientific Research. Education Marie Claire Villeval obtained her PhD in economics from the Paris-Nanterre University in 1982 and her Habilitation from the University of Lyon in 1998.
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Nicoli Nattrass
#25063
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nicoli Nattrass is a South African development economist who is professor of economics at the University of Cape Town . She is the co-director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa and was the founding director of the Centre for Social Science Research .
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Susanna Loeb
#37818
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Susanna Loeb is an American education economist and director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. She was previously the Barnett Family Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she also served as founding director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis . Moreover, she directs Policy Analysis for California Education . Her research interests include the economics of education and the relationship between schools and educational policies, in particular school finance and teacher labor markets.
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Nina Pavcnik
#104217
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Nina Pavcnik is the Niehaus Family Professor in International Studies for the Economics Department at Dartmouth College. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of international trade, development, and industrial organization with specific focus on how agents respond to globalization. Pavcnik's diverse works analyze the effects of globalization on child laborers, households, workers, and firms. Her most recent work studies the effect of large-scale trade policy reforms on economic growth and inequality.
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Sharyn O'Halloran
#61994
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Sharyn O’Halloran is the Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin and Trinity Professorial Fellow. In 2006 she was named the George Blumenthal Professor of Political Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City., where she served as the Senior Vice Dean and Chief Academic Officer at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University in New York City.[1] A political scientist and economist by training, O’Halloran has written extensively on issues related to the political economy of internat...
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Siobhan Austen
#88027
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Siobhan Austen is an Australian economist and was a Professor of Economics and discipline lead of Economics at Curtin University until December 2020. Academic career Austen obtained her Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis, on the topic of the cultural aspects of labor markets, and was later published as a book by Edward Elgar Publishing. She has published more than 100 scholarly works.
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Catherine Tucker
#10927
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, where she is also chair of the PhD program. She is known for her research into the consequences of digital data for electronic privacy, algorithmic bias, digital health, social media and online advertising. She is also a research associate at the NBER, cofounder of the Cryptoeconomics lab at MIT with Christian Catalini and coeditor at Quantitative Marketing Economics.
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AnnMari Jansson
#45389
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Eva AnnMari Jansson née Olausson was a Swedish scientist who specialized in systems ecology. She is remembered for studying the interaction between ecology and economics, contributing to early research into ecological economics. Together with her husband , she undertook research at the Askö Laboratory into the fauna of the Baltic Sea, especially in the Cladophora Belt. Increasingly, under the influence of the American researcher Howard T. Odum, she turned her attention to ecology, examining the interaction between different species and the environment. In 1988, she helped to establish the Int...
Go to Profile#293
Carol Graham
#52475
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a College Park professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor , and the author of numerous books, papers and edited volume chapters.
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Leeat Yariv
#86522
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Leeat Yariv is the Uwe E. Reinhardt Professor of Economics at Princeton University, a research fellow of CEPR, and a research associate of NBER. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held positions at UCLA and Caltech prior to her move to Princeton in 2017, where she is the founder and director of the Princeton Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences . Yariv’s research focuses on political economy, market design, social and economic networks, and experimental economics.
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Rema Hanna
#80965
Overall Influence
Rema Hanna is an economist and is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South East Asia Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Moreover, she currently serves as co-director of the Evidence for Policy Design research programme at Harvard's Center for International Development and a scientific co-director for Southeast Asia at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab . Her research focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of public services in developing countries, with specific focus on service delivery and the impacts of corruption. She is also the co-chair of the editoria...
Go to Profile#296
Judith K. Hellerstein
#100207
Overall Influence
Judith K. Hellerstein is the Chair of the Economics department and Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a former co-editor of The Journal of Human Resources, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she chairs the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys. She served as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers during 2011–2012.
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Elisabeth Sadoulet
#112212
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elisabeth Sadoulet is an economist and Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley who has carried out field research in China, India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Sadoulet was the editor of the World Bank Economic Review from 2010 to 2013, and is a fellow of several scholarly associations in the fields of agriculture and economics.
Go to Profile#298
Valerie Ramey
#85274
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Valerie Ramey is an American economist at University of California, San Diego and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2018, she was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and research associate at the NBER. She was awarded the R. K. Cho Economics Prize in 2020.
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Ann-Kristin Achleitner
#35745
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ann-Kristin Achleitner is a German economist, currently a professor at Technical University of Munich. Career Before taking on her current position, Achleitner held an Endowed Chair for Banking and Finance at EBS University of Business and Law from 1995 to 2001 and Honorary Professor at EBS from 2002 to 2013. She is a member of acatech.
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Linda S. Goldberg
#99882
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Linda S. Goldberg is an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and is currently Senior Vice President in the Research Policy Leadership division. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Economics from Queens College of the City University of New York.
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