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 people in Economics,
#51
Paul Sweezy
#675
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review. He is best remembered for his contributions to economic theory as one of the leading Marxian economists of the second half of the 20th century.
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Deirdre McCloskey
#547
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is the distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago . She is also adjunct professor of philosophy and classics there, and for five years was a visiting professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctoratess. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests i...
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Aaron Director
#688
Overall Influence
1901 - 2004 (103 years)
Aaron Director was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics. Director was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and together with his brother-in-law, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, Director influenced some of the next generation of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
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Edmund Phelps
#976
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Edmund Strother Phelps is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations.
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Jean Tirole
#558
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jean Tirole is a French professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and psychology. Especially he focused on regulation of economics where he wants that it will not hinder the innovation and it will keeps a fair rules.
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Hal Varian
#1356
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
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Myron Scholes
#295
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Myron Samuel Scholes is a Canadian–American financial economist. Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model. Scholes is currently the chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Capital Partners. Previously he served as the chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors board of directors, American Century Mutual Fund board of directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and...
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Douglass North
#559
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Douglass Cecil North was an American economist known for his work in economic history. Along with Robert Fogel, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."
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Israel Kirzner
#1036
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Israel Meir Kirzner is a British-born American economist closely identified with the Austrian School. Early life and education The son of a well-known rabbi and Talmudist, Kirzner was born in London and reached the United States by way of South Africa.
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James Meade
#1188
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
James Meade was a British economist. Along with Richard Kahn, James Meade helped develop the concept of the Keynesian multiplier while participating in the Cambridge circus. In the 1930s, he served as specialist adviser on behalf of the British government at the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations.
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Steve Keen
#1536
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific, and empirically unsupported. Keen was formerly an associate professor of economics at University of Western Sydney, until he applied for voluntary redundancy in 2013, due to the closure of the economics program at the university. In 2014, he became a professor and Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University in London. He has since taken retirement and is crowd source funded to undertake independent research...
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Esther Duflo
#921
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#63
Matthew Rabin
#1109
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Matthew Joel Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. Rabin's research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His topics of interest include errors in statistical reasoning and the evolution of beliefs, effects of choice context on exhibited preferences, reference-dependent preferences, and errors people make in inference in market and learning settings.
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Robert Lucas Jr.
#1377
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was an American economist at the University of Chicago. Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995 "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy". He was characterized by N. Gregory Mankiw as "the most influential macroeconomist of the last quarter of the 20th century". In 2020, he ranked as the 10th most cited economist in the...
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John Maynard Keynes
#4878
Overall Influence
#66
Robert Mundell
#862
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Robert Alexander Mundell was a Canadian economist. He was a professor of economics at Columbia University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for his pioneering work in monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas. Mundell is known as the "father" of the euro, as he laid the groundwork for its introduction through this work and helped to start the movement known as supply-side economics. Mundell was also known for the Mundell–Fleming model and Mundell–Tobin effect.
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Hirofumi Uzawa
#2443
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Hirofumi Uzawa was a Japanese economist. Biography Uzawa was born on July 21, 1928, in Yonago, Tottori to a farming family. He attended the Tokyo First Middle School and the First Higher School, Japan .
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Paul Davidson
#3200
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Paul Davidson is an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He is a prolific writer and has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position critical of mainstream economics.
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John Harsanyi
#246
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
John Charles Harsanyi was a Hungarian-American economist and the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. He is best known for his contributions to the study of game theory and its application to economics, specifically for his developing the highly innovative analysis of games of incomplete information, so-called Bayesian games. He also made important contributions to the use of game theory and economic reasoning in political and moral philosophy as well as contributing to the study of equilibrium selection. For his work, he was a co-recipient along with John Nash...
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Alan Blinder
#1848
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alan Stuart Blinder is an American economics professor at Princeton University and is listed among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a leading macroeconomist, politically liberal, and a champion of Keynesian economics and policies.
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James Mirrlees
#1425
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in the 1997 Birthday Honours. Early life and education Born in Minnigaff, Kirkcudbrightshire, Mirrlees was educated at Douglas Ewart High School, then at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge . He was a very active student debater. A contemporary, Quentin Skinner, has suggested that Mirrlees was a member of the Cambridge Apostles along with fellow Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen during the period.
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Jacob Mincer
#3078
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Jacob Mincer , was a father of modern labor economics. He was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Economics and Social Relations at Columbia University for most of his active life. Biography Born in Tomaszów Lubelski, Poland, in a Jewish family, Mincer survived World War II in concentration camps in Poland and Germany as a teenager. After graduating from Emory University in 1950, Mincer received his PhD from Columbia University in 1957.
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Michael Spence
#520
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Andrew Michael Spence is a Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate. Spence is the William R. Berkley Professor in Economics and Business at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Management, Emeritus, and Dean, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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Armen Alchian
#1537
Overall Influence
1914 - 2013 (99 years)
Armen Albert Alchian was an American economist. He spent almost his entire career at the University of California, Los Angeles . A major microeconomic theorist, he is known as one of the founders of new institutional economics and widely acknowledged for his work on property rights.
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Eric Maskin
#913
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University.
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Thomas Schelling
#354
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Thomas Crombie Schelling was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He was also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis."
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Harry Markowitz
#241
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Harry Max Markowitz was an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Markowitz was a professor of finance at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego . He is best known for his pioneering work in modern portfolio theory, studying the effects of asset risk, return, correlation and diversification on probable investment portfolio returns.
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William Nordhaus
#1545
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modelingling and climate change, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".
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Daron Acemoglu
#811
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#80
Finn E. Kydland
#1713
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Finn Erling Kydland is a Norwegian economist known for his contributions to business cycle theory. He is the Henley Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds the Richard P. Simmons Distinguished Professorship at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his PhD, and a part-time position at the Norwegian School of Economics . Kydland was a co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, with Edward C. Prescott, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and...
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Neil Wallace
#3051
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Neil Wallace is an American economist and professor of economics at Penn State University. He is considered one of the main proponents of new classical macroeconomics in the field of economics. Education Wallace earned his BA in economics from Columbia University in 1960 and his Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago in 1964, where he studied under Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.
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Martin Wolf
#576
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Martin Harry Wolf is a British journalist who focuses on economics. He is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Early life Wolf was born in London, in 1946. His father Edmund was an Austrian Jewishish playwright who migrated from Vienna to England before World War II. In London, Edmund met Wolf's mother, a Dutch Jew who had lost nearly thirty close relatives in the Holocaust. Wolf recalls that his background left him wary of political extremes and encouraged his interest in economics, as he felt economic policy mistakes were one of the root causes of World War II. He was...
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Robert Barro
#1921
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
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Robin Wells
#3313
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robin Elizabeth Wells is an American economist. She is the co-author of several economics texts, mostly with her husband Paul Krugman. Life and career Wells received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wells did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught or done research at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton, Stanford University, MIT, and Princeton University.
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Clive Granger
#1734
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Sir Clive William John Granger was a British econometrician known for his contributions to nonlinear time series analysis. He taught in Britain, at the University of Nottingham and in the United States, at the University of California, San Diego. Granger was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2003 in recognition of the contributions that he and his co-winner, Robert F. Engle, had made to the analysis of time series data. This work fundamentally changed the way in which economists analyse financial and macroeconomic data.
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Lars Peter Hansen
#1760
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
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Maurice Allais
#1009
Overall Influence
1911 - 2010 (99 years)
Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks and Paul Samuelson , to neoclassical synthesis. They formalize the self-regulation of markets, that Keynes refuted, while reiterating some of his ideas.
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Jagdish Bhagwati
#1029
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-born naturalized American economist and one of the most influential trade theorists of his generation. He is a University Professor of economics and law at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has made significant contributions to international trade theory and economic development.
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Christopher A. Pissarides
#2489
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics and Political Science, Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."
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Reinhard Selten
#424
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten was a German economist, who won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences . He is also well known for his work in bounded rationality and can be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental economics.
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John Quiggin
#1436
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
John Quiggin is an Australian economist, a professor at the University of Queensland. He was formerly an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Federation Fellow and a member of the board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.
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Angus Deaton
#982
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#93
Trygve Haavelmo
#1365
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Trygve Magnus Haavelmo , born in Skedsmo, Norway, was an economist whose research interests centered on econometrics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1989. Biography After attending Oslo Cathedral School, Haavelmo received a degree in economics from the University of Oslo in 1930 and eventually joined the Institute of Economics with the recommendation of Ragnar Frisch. Haavelmo was Frisch's assistant for a period of time until he was appointed as head of computations for the institute. In 1936, Haavelmo studied statistics at University College London while he subsequently traveled to Berlin, Geneva, and Oxford for additional studies.
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Nobuhiro Kiyotaki
#3361
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Nobuhiro Kiyotaki FBA is a Japanese economist and the Harold H. Helms '20 Professor of Economics and Banking at Princeton University. He is especially known for proposing several models that provide deeper microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, some of which play a prominent role in New Keynesian macroeconomics.
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Dani Rodrik
#1182
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#96
Claudia Goldin
#855
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,” as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.
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Anthony Downs
#599
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Anthony Downs was an American economist specializing in public policy and public administration. His research focuses included political choice theory, rent control, affordable housing, and transportation economics. He wrote a number of books including, An Economic Theory of Democracy and Inside Bureaucracy , which have been major influences on the public choice school of political economy. In Downs's Law of Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion , he accurately predicted that expanding expressways could not reduce traffic congestion, since demand would increase as well, and that reducing speeds incre...
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Huw Dixon
#3502
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Huw David Dixon , born 1958, is a British economist. He has been a professor at Cardiff Business School since 2006, having previously been Head of Economics at the University of York after being a professor of economics there , and the University of Swansea , a Reader at Essex University and a lecturer at Birkbeck College 1983–1987.
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Robert Fogel
#628
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history – the use of quantitative methods in history.
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Richard D. Wolff
#730
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I , and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
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