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,

#351

Garance Genicot

#69711
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Garance Genicot is a Belgian-American economist and associate professor of economics at Georgetown University. She is a member of the Core Group at Theoretical Research in Development Economics , a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research Development Economics Program, a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in both the Political Economy Program and in the Development Economics Program, a Fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a research fellow at the IZA Institute. From 2013 to 2018, she served as an External Member of the World Bank Research Management Committee.
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#352

Chinhui Juhn

#116682
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Chinhui Juhn is the Henry Graham Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Research Fellow of IZA Institute of Labor Economics. She graduated from Yale University in 1984, and completed her PhD in economics at the University of Chicago in 1991. She is an Editor of the American Economic Review, one of the most cited journals in the world. Together with her husband, Edward R. Allen III, she is a patron of the arts in Houston.
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#353

Friederike Welter

#131892
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
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#354

Ioana Marinescu

#105622
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Ioana Elena Marinescu is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a columnist for Libération, whose research is widely covered in the popular media.
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#355

Susanne Schennach

#115413
Overall Influence
Susanne Maria Schennach is an economist and professor at Brown University. She is an econometrician whose work focuses on measurement error. Schennach has been an assistant editor at The Econometrics Journal, Econometric Theory, and Econometrica.
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#356

Sylvie Fogiel Bijaoui

#54018
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui is a professor of sociology at College of Management in Israel. Her research is in the field of equality in the modern and post-modern era. Biography Fogiel-Bijaoui was raised in Paris. In 1969, at the age of 18, she made aliyah to Israel and attended ulpan at Kibbutz Ma'abarot.
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#357

Radhika Balakrishnan

Radhika Balakrishnan
#73479
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Radhika Balakrishnan is the faculty director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as the Chair of the Board of the United States Human Rights Network and Chair on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Commissioner for the Commission for Gender Equity for the City of New York, and President of the International Association for Feminist Economics for 2020-2021.
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#358

Elizabeth Hoffman

#66225
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Celia Elizabeth Hoffman was executive vice president and provost of Iowa State University from 2007 to 2012, where she remains as professor of economics. From 2000 to 2005, she was president of the University of Colorado System, where she is president emerita. She is also a senior distinguished fellow at the Searle Center on Law, Regulations, and Economic Growth at Northwestern University School of Law, and serves on numerous for-profit and non-profit Boards. She served on the National Science Board from 2002 to 2008. Her published research is in the areas of Experimental economics, Cliom...
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#359

Ilyana Kuziemko

#100330
Overall Influence
Ilyana Kuziemko is a professor of economics at Princeton University, where she has taught since 2014. She previously served as the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School from July 2013 to June 2014 and as associate professor from July 2012 to June 2013. From 2007 to 2012, she was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and Woodrow Wilson School. She also served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2009 to 2010 under The Office of Microeconomic Analysis. Duri...
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#360

Caterina Faggio

#134031
Overall Influence
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#361

Maureen Brunt

#79506
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Maureen Brunt was an Australian economist and academic who specialised in the field of competition law. She was Emeritus professor of Economics at Monash University. Early life and education Brunt received a degree in economics from the University of Melbourne in 1951 and a Doctor of Philosophy in industrial organization from Harvard University in 1964.
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#362

Deborah A. Cobb-Clark

#120443
Overall Influence
Deborah A. Cobb-Clark is an Australian economist. She is currently working as a Professor in the University of Sydney and as a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. She has also worked in Bonn, Germany at the Institute for the Study of Labor since 2000, where she holds the position of director of the Program in Gender and Families.
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#363

Laura Starks

#51256
Overall Influence
Laura T. Starks is an American academic administrator. Starks earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Texas at Austin, a master's of business administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and returned to UTAustin for a doctorate. She was the Charles E. & Sarah M. Seay Regents’ Chair in Finance at the McCombs School of Business until her 2015 appointment as interim dean of the school. After Starks vacated the deanship, she was named George Kozmetsky Centennial University Distinguished Chair.
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#364

Rachel Croson

#116129
Overall Influence
Rachel Toni Algaze Croson is an economist currently serving as Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Minnesota, and McKnight Endowed Professor of Economics. Until March 2020, she served as Dean of the College of Social Science and MSU Foundation Professor of Economics at Michigan State University. She earned her bachelor's degree in economics and the philosophy of science from the University of Pennsylvania and her master's and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
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#365

Manisha Shah

#95974
Overall Influence
Manisha Shah is an economist, as well as Vice-Chair and Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She received her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in agricultural and resource economics in 2006. Additionally, she is the founding director of the Global Lab for Research in Action, an editor at the Journal of Health Economics as well as a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor, and a faculty affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
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#366

Wiji Arulampalam

#128693
Overall Influence
Sowmya Wijayambal Arulampalam, known as Wiji Arulampalam, is an economist and professor at the department of economics in the University of Warwick. Arulampalam is the 152nd most cited female economist in the world according to the RePEc/IDEAS ranking.
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#367

Susan Helper

#71692
Overall Influence
Susan Helper is an American economist. She is the Frank Tracy Carlton Professor of Economics at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Education Helper received a Bachelors of Arts in Economics, Government, and Spanish from Oberlin College and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
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#368

Joanna Cygler

Joanna Cygler
#71104
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Joanna Agnieszka Cygler is a Polish economist and professor of management at the Warsaw School of Economics. Career Cygler was born in Warsaw and graduated from Warsaw School of Economics in 1991. In 1999, she earned her Ph.D. in management in management for the thesis , for which she also received the Karol Adamiecki Award in 2000. In 2009, following her thesis Kooperencja przedsiębiorstw. Czynniki sektorowe i korporacyjne , she received her habilitation. It was published under the same title and recognized in the 9th edition of the best habilitation competition organized by the Committee of Organization and Management Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences .
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#369

Estelle Bee Dagum

#90983
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Estela Bee Dagum is an Argentine and Canadian economist and statistician who was a professor "chiara fama" of statistical sciences at the University of Bologna. She is known for her research on time series analysis, and in particular for developing the X-11-ARIMA method of seasonal adjustment, which became widely used and is a predecessor to X-12-ARIMA and later methods.
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#370

Louise Fresco

Louise Fresco
#17744
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Louise Ottilie Fresco is a Dutch scientist and writer known for her work on globally sustainable food production. Career in academia Fresco has been the President of the Wageningen University & Research Executive Board since 1 July 2014. She is a professor at Wageningen University and a corresponding member of Belgium's Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences.
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#371

Diane Schanzenbach

#85752
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an American economist who studies the effects of policies aimed at alleviating child poverty, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program . She works at Northwestern University as Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at their School of Education and Social Policy. She is also the director of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research and the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, as well as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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#372

Victoria Ivashina

#92377
Overall Influence
Victoria Ivashina is a Russian-American economist and Lovett-Learned Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School, where she has taught since 2006. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research .
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#373

Justine Hastings

#66669
Overall Influence
Justine Hastings is an American economist, academic, and policy advisor. She is currently a vice president and chief of people-centered science at Amazon and an affiliate professor of economics at the University of Washington. Previously, she served as professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown University, and as an associate professor of economics at Yale University. Her research focuses on combining economics and big data to solve social problems, spanning topics across education policy, retirement policy, household finance, marketing, competition, antitrust, and en...
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#374

Manju Puri

#71731
Overall Influence
Manju Puri is an economist who currently works as the J. B. Fuqua Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is an editor at the Review of Financial Studies and currently the director of the American Finance Association.
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#375

Irene Cetin

#140230
Overall Influence
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#376

Marie-Anne Frison-Roche

#70759
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marie-Anne Frison-Roche is a professor of Economic Law at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. She is a specialist in Regulatory Law, whose doctrine she founded in France. Studies Her studies notably consisted of a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy at the Université de la Sorbonne in 1987, a Master of Advanced Studies in Private Law at Université Pantheon Sorbonne in 1984, a Master of Advanced Studies in Procedural Law at Panthéon-Assas University in 1983, and a State Doctorate in Private Law, which she obtained after defending a thesis entitled Generalities on the Adversarial Principle at Panthéon-Assas University in 1988.
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#377

Rosamond L. Naylor

#106686
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Rosamond Lee Naylor is an American economist focused on global food security and sustainable agriculture. She is the William Wrigley Professor of the Stanford University School of Earth System Science, and the founding Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. Her academic career has centered on environmental science and policy related to global food systems and food security. She is the President of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Global Change Institute, a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, and a member of the Forest Protection Adviso...
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#378

Suzi Kerr

#115533
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Suzi Clare Kerr is a New Zealand economist. She joined Environmental Defense Fund in 2019 as its chief economist. Biography After completing a BSc at Canterbury University and a PhD at Harvard University, she started Wellington-based non-profit economic and public policy research institute, 'Motu Economic and Public Policy Research'. The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme work has been a strong focus.
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#379

Kathleen M. McGarry

#108757
Overall Influence
Kathleen M. McGarry is a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is also a co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Survey. From 2007 to 2009, she was Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt ‘72 Professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. She has served on the Editorial Boards of the American Economic Journal: Public Policy, the American Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Pension Economics.
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#380

Roberta Capello

#141632
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
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#381

Ayelet Gneezy

Ayelet Gneezy
#105812
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ayelet Gneezy is an associate professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego. Education and career Gneezy obtained her MBA at the University of Teesside joint with The Hague University of Applied Sciences. She went on to manage the strategic planning department in DataPro Proximity in Israel, before receiving her PhD in marketing at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 2007.
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#382

Carmen Diana Deere

#68379
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Carmen Diana Deere is an American feminist economist who is an expert on land policy and agrarian reform, rural social movements, and gender in Latin American development. She has conducted extensive research on access to land, economic autonomy of rural women, and property rights in Latin America. Deere's research and work, often carried out with Magdalena León de Leal, have contributed to promoting the changes that have taken place since 1980 in the vast majority of countries in Latin America with respect to the reform of land laws, civil codes, and family matters, as well as the approval o...
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#383

Ann Fetter Friedlaender

#84393
Overall Influence
1938 - 1992 (54 years)
Ann Fetter Friedlaender was a noted American economist. Friedlaender held appointments in two MIT departments as Professor of Civil Engineering and Economics for the class of 1941. Dr Friedlaender was seen as an authority in the field of public finance, with a speciality in transportation studies. The first woman to head one of MIT's five schools, she served as Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science from 1984 to 1990.
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#384

Gilat Levy

#107760
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gilat Levy is an economist, researcher and council member. She has previously worked as a lecturer at Tel Aviv University at the Berglas School of Economics. Levy also held a role at Princeton as a Visiting Fellow prior to her arrival at the London School of Economics in 2008 as a full-time professor.
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#385

Barbara Petrongolo

#126072
Overall Influence
Barbara Petrongolo is an Italian economist, professor, researcher, and writer. She is currently a professor at Queen Mary University of London, Director of the Labour Economics Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and Co-editor of the Economic Journal which is world renowned for being one of the founding economic journals. Petrongolo previously worked at the London School of Economics, the Paris School of Economics and the Universidad Carlos III . Petrongolo's economic research focuses...
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#386

Catherine Kling

#120389
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Catherine L. Kling is an American economist, currently a Tisch University Professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and Faculty Director at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. In 2015, Kling was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Kling has conducted research in the areas of environmental policy design and the valuation of environmental goods.
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#387

Emmanuelle Auriol

#96046
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Emmanuelle Auriol is a French economist. She is chair of the Women in Economics Committee. Career Auriol is an IDEI researcher, a member of the Toulouse School of Economics and professor of economics at the University of Aix-Marseille and Toulouse I . She is mainly devoted to the study of the regulation and organization theory, including industrial organization and the economics of development.
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#388

Roberta Rabellotti

#59672
Overall Influence
Roberta Rabellotti is an Italian professor of economics at the Department of Business and Management at Aalborg University. Furthermore, Rabellotti is employed as a professor of economics at the University of Pavia.
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#389

Marcella Alsan

#26765
Overall Influence
Marcella Alsan is an infectious disease physician and an applied microeconomist studying health inequality. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
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#390

Mardi Dungey

#116440
Overall Influence
1966 - 2019 (53 years)
Mardi Helen Dungey was an Australian macroeconomist. Birth and education Dungey was born in 1966. She graduated from the University of Tasmania with a BEc in 1988. She won a cadetship with the Reserve Bank of Australia, working there until 1994, when she commenced her PhD at the Australian National University . She completed her thesis titled "International influences on the Australian economy" in 1998.
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#391

Lucia Foster

#97851
Overall Influence
Lucia Smith Foster is the Chief of the Center for Economic Studies and the Chief Economist at the U.S Census Bureau in Washington, D.C. Biography Foster received a B.A. in economics from Georgetown University in 1983 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland in 1988.
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#392

Mari Rege

#99211
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Mari Rege is a Norwegian economist and professor of economics at the University of Stavanger. Appointed there in 2009, she is the youngest such professor to be appointed in Norway. She specializes in family, gender equality, working life, and school performance issues.
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#393

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

#55893
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln is a German economist and currently holds the Chair for Macroeconomics and Development at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research has been awarded the Gossen Prize in 2016 and the Leibniz Prize in 2018. The Leibniz award is considered to be one of the highest scientific awards in all of Germany.
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#394

Joanna Coast

#146194
Overall Influence
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#395

Isabella Weber

#85567
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Isabella M. Weber is a German economist. She is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Weber is known for having taken a position in favor of a price control policy. Her article published in The Guardian in December 2021 caused an uproar among economists.
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#396

Claudia Ringler

#146586
Overall Influence
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#397

Francesca Molinari

#88953
Overall Influence
Francesca Molinari is an Italian economist and economic statististician specializing in theoretical and applied econometrics, whose research topics include risk aversion, survey methodology, and set identification. She is H. T. Warshow and Robert Irving Warshow Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at Cornell University.
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#398

Tiziana Di Matteo

#108895
Overall Influence
Tiziana Di Matteo is a Professor of Econophysics at King's College London. She studies complex systems, such as financial markets, and complex materials . She serves on the council of the Complex Systems Society.
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#399

Evelyn Matthei

#70777
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Evelyn Rose Matthei Fornet is a Chilean politician and the current mayor of Providencia, a prosperous commune of Santiago, serving since 2016. Prior to her current position, she held the role of Deputy in the Chilean Congress from 1990 to 1998, and subsequently served as a Senator from 1998 to 2011. In January 2011, she left her Senate seat to assume the role of Minister of Labor and Social Security under Chilean President Sebastián Piñera until July 2013. In the 2013 Chilean general election, she ran for President with the support of the Independent Democrat Union Party. However, she lost in...
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#400

Beth E. Allen

#104154
Overall Influence
Beth Elaine Allen is a professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and has served as the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in that department. At the University of Minnesota, she teaches Advanced Game Theory and Advanced Topics in Economics. She graduated with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. She specializes in competition, economic theory, economic trends, economics of information and uncertainty, game theory, microeconomic theory, microeconomics, and price-setting. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, an...
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