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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Economics,
#501
Simon Johnson
#5380
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Simon H. Johnson is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including professor of economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Go to Profile#502
Benjamin M. Friedman
#9640
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Benjamin Morton Friedman is an American political economist, who is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute's Panel on Economic Activity, and the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He is a recipient of the John R. Commons Award, given by the economics honor society Omicron Delta Epsilon.
Go to Profile#503
Laurence Kotlikoff
#8072
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Laurence Jacob Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, a William Warren Fairfield Professor at Boston University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a former Senior Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
Go to Profile#504
William Brainard
#17409
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
William C. "Bill" Brainard is an American economist. He is the Arthur Okun Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, and he served as the provost of the university from 1981 to 1986. Brainard is the namesake of the William C. Brainard chair, which current Yale provost Ben Polak holds. Brainard earned both his economics M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale. He has been teaching at Yale since 1962.
Go to Profile#505
Steven Landsburg
#11650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Steven E. Landsburg is an American professor of economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. From 1989 to 1995, he taught at Colorado State University. Landsburg is also an outspoken commentator on economic, legal, and political issues whose comments have sometimes been regarded as controversial.
Go to Profile#506
David Laibman
#15558
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Laibman is an American economist. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. He is the editor emeritus of Science & Society, a quarterly Marxist journal founded in 1936.
Go to Profile#507
Moses Abramovitz
#11467
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Moses Abramovitz was a 20th-century American economist and professor. During his career, he made many contributions to the study of macroeconomic fluctuations and economic growth over time. Biography Born and raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he completed his bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude at Harvard University. He went to Harvard with the intention of becoming a lawyer and studied criminal justice as well as economics. However, he became more interested in economics because he was able to connect it to the world in which he was living. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1939.
Go to Profile#508
Mark Watson
#15393
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mark W. Watson is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Prior to coming to Princeton in 1995, Watson served on the economics faculty at Harvard University and Northwestern University. His research focuses on time-series econometrics, empirical macroeconomics, and macroeconomic forecasting.
Go to Profile#509
Clemens August Andreae
#16286
Overall Influence
1929 - 1991 (62 years)
Clemens August Andreae was an Austrian economist who served as a professor of political economics and the dean of law and political sciences for the University of Innsbruck. He wrote a book called Der größere Markt – Wirtschaftsintegration vom Atlantik bis zum Ural . Andreae was scheduled to give the opening speech for the 1986 Salzburg Festival; the opening speech is typically given by a prominent scientist or artist. Andreae replaced Ralf Dahrendorf, a West German sociologist and professor, who withdrew the pledge because he did not want to speak to an audience that included Kurt Waldheim, ...
Go to Profile#510
Ignazio Visco
#12234
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ignazio Visco is an Italian economist and central banker and Governor of the Bank of Italy fromn 2011 to 2023. Early life and education Visco was born in Naples on 21 November 1949. He obtained a summa cum laude degree in economics from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1971 with Federico Caffè as supervisor and continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania , where he obtained an MA in 1974 and a PhD in Economics in 1981.
Go to Profile#511
Bina Agarwal
#6379
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bina Agarwal is an Indian development economist and Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation.
Go to Profile#512
Robert Pindyck
#12513
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Stephen Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.
Go to Profile#513
Robert Tollison
#13114
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Robert D. Tollison was an American economist who specialized in public choice theory. Education A native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Tollison attended local Wofford College where he earned an A.B. in business administration and economics in 1964. He completed an M.A. in economics at the University of Alabama a year later. After completing his master's in Tuscaloosa, Tollison moved to Virginia to begin teaching at Longwood University, then called "Longwood College." Shortly thereafter he commenced work on his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Virginia. He finished his doctoral degree...
Go to Profile#514
Douglas Bernheim
#12486
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
B. Douglas Bernheim is an American professor of Economics, currently the Edward Ames Edmunds Professor of Economics at Stanford University; his previous academic appointments have included an endowed chair in Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University and an endowed chair in Insurance and Risk Management at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Department of Finance. He has published many articles in academic journals, and has received a number of awards recognizing his contributions to the field of economics. He is a partner with Bates White, LLC...
Go to Profile#515
Lawrence J. Christiano
#24945
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lawrence J. Christiano is an American economist and researcher. He is a professor of economics at Northwestern University, where he also holds the title of the Alfred W. Chase Chair in Business Institutions, and was chairman of the department of economics from 2016 to 2018. He previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#516
Camille Landais
#17738
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Camille Landais is a French economist who currently works as Professor of economics at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on public finance and labour economics. In 2016, Landais was awarded the Prize of Best Young Economist of France for his research on the relationship between changes in inequality and fiscal and social policy.
Go to Profile#517
Jerome Powell
#2320
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jerome Hayden "Jay" Powell is an American attorney and investment banker who has served since 2018 as the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve. After earning a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, he moved to investment banking in 1984, and worked for several financial institutions, including as a partner of The Carlyle Group. In 1992, Powell briefly served as under secretary of the Treasury for domestic finance under President George H. W. Bush. Powell left Carlyle Group in 2005 and founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm.
Go to Profile#518
William K. Black
#4725
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William Kurt Black is an American lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator. Black's expertise is in white-collar crime, public finance, regulation, and other topics in law and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud.
Go to Profile#519
Jan Švejnar
#14109
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jan Švejnar is a United States-based, Czech-born economist. He was a candidate for the 2008 election of the President of the Czech Republic. Professor Švejnar is director of the Center on Global Economic Governance and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. He is also a founder and chairman of CERGE-EI in Prague . He also served as the chairman of the Supervisory Board of ČSOB Bank and co-editor of the Economics of Transition. Since 2007, he is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research . He is also a Fellow of...
Go to Profile#520
Robert Pollin
#9120
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Pollin is an American economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also founding co-director of its Political Economy Research Institute . Pollen received his PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research in 1982. He has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and United Nations Development Program. He has also worked as an advisor to US Senator Bernie Sanders.
Go to Profile#521
Albert Ando
#10941
Overall Influence
1929 - 2002 (73 years)
was a Japanese-born economist. Biography He was born in Tokyo, as a member of family running Ando Corporation, a major construction company. He didn't join the family business, and came to the United States after World War II. He received his B.S. in economics from the Seattle University in 1951, his M.A. in economics from St. Louis University in 1953, and an M.S. in economics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in mathematical economics in 1959 from Carnegie Institute of Technology . At Carnegie Mellon he collaborated, among others, with Herbert A. Simon on questions regarding aggregation and causation in ec...
Go to Profile#522
Ester Boserup
#3564
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Ester Boserup was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and wrote seminal books on agrarian change and the role of women in development.
Go to Profile#523
V. V. Chari
#14901
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Varadarajan Venkata Chari is an Indian-American economist and professor of economics, currently teaches macroeconomic theory, public economics, and monetary economics at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts.
Go to Profile#524
Richard E. Caves
#8723
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Richard Earl Caves was an American economist, and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is known for his work on multinational corporations, industrial organization and the creative industries. He is known within the film economics field as the author of a definitive book on the organization of creative industries.
Go to Profile#525
Haruhiko Kuroda
#3132
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
is a Japanese banker and a former Ministry of Finance government official who served as the 31st Governor of the Bank of Japan from March 2013 to April 2023 and is currently a Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies . From 2003 Mr Kuroda served as Special Advisor to the Cabinet of Prime Minister Koizumi, while teaching economics and finance as a Professor at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of Economics. He was formerly the President of the Asian Development Bank from 1 February 2005 to 18 March 2013.
Go to Profile#526
Viral Acharya
#11609
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Viral V. Acharya is an Indian economist who was appointed as Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank of India . He also served as a member of the advisory council of the RBI Academy and was a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Securities Markets , Securities and Exchange Board of India since 2014. As of 23 January 2017, he was appointed to serve a three-year term as a Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He resigned from the post in July 2019 with 6 months left for his completion of term.
Go to Profile#527
Peter Phillips
#31575
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Charles Bonest Phillips is an econometrician. Since 1979 he has been Professor of Economics and Statistics at Yale University. He also holds positions at the University of Auckland, Singapore Management University and the University of Southampton. He is currently the co-director of Center for Financial Econometrics of Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics at Singapore Management University and is an adjunct professor of econometrics at the University of Southampton.
Go to Profile#528
Yevgeny Yasin
#4610
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Yevgeny Grigoryevich Yasin was a Russian economist. He served as the economy minister of Russia from 1994 to 1997. Until July 2021, he was an academic supervisor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He was a regular contributor to the Echo of Moscow radio station.
Go to Profile#529
Jay Barney
#3773
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jay B. Barney is an American professor in strategic management at the University of Utah. Infancy and education Jay Barney was born in Walnut Creek, California, on October 8, 1954. He spent his formative years in San Bruno, California and graduated from San Carlos High School in San Carlos, California in 1972. He attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he majored in sociology. He graduated from BYU, summa cum laude, in December 1974 and began the Doctor of Philosophy program in sociology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976.
Go to Profile#530
Dhammika Dharmapala
#11031
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dhammika Dharmapala is an economist who is the Paul H. and Theo Leffman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is known for his research into corporate tax avoidance, corporate use of tax havens, and the corporate use of base erosion and profit shifting techniques.
Go to Profile#531
Michael C. Burda
#27792
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michael Christopher Burda is an American macroeconomist and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 1993 he has served as director of the Institute for Economic Theory II and since 2007 visiting professor at the European School of Management and Technology . He has also taught at Berkeley and INSEAD. In 1998, Burda received the Gossen Prize of the German Verein für Socialpolitik. He is research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research , Institute for the Study of Labor and a fellow of the European Economic Association.
Go to Profile#532
Alan J. Auerbach
#15143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alan J. Auerbach is an American economist. He is currently the director of the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and earned his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University and was an assistant and then an associate professor at Harvard. He was then a professor of law and economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#533
Zhang Weiying
#10515
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Zhang Weiying is a Chinese economist and was head of the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He is known for his advocacy of free markets and his ideas have been influenced by the Austrian School.
Go to Profile#534
Steven Durlauf
#14333
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Steven Neil Durlauf is an American social scientist and economist. He is currently Steans Professor in Educational Policy and the inaugural Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As of 2021, is also a Part Time Professor at the New Economic School.
Go to Profile#535
H. Gregg Lewis
#19700
Overall Influence
1914 - 1992 (78 years)
Harold Gregg Lewis was an American economist notable for his contributions in labor economics. He was considered a principal member of the monetarist, free-market-oriented Chicago school of economics.
Go to Profile#536
Avner Greif
#9890
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Avner Greif is an economics professor at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He holds a chaired professorship as Bowman Family Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. Greif received his PhD in Economics at Northwestern University, where Joel Mokyr acted as his supervisor, in 1989 and started his career at Stanford University in 1989 until he received tenure in 1994. In 1998 he received a 'genius grant' from the MacArthur Foundation. His works deal with economic history and role of institutions in economic development, including analysis of trade in medieval Europe and Levant.
Go to Profile#537
Diana Strassmann
#20702
Overall Influence
Diana Louise Strassmann is an American economist, currently Carolyn and Fred McManis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rice University, and also co-founder of International Association for Feminist Economics and its journal Feminist Economics.
Go to Profile#538
Sergei Guriev
#5914
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sergey Maratovich Guriyev is a Russian economist, who is provost and a professor of economics at the Instituts d'études politiques in Paris . He is a former member of the Russian government. From 2016 to 2019, he was the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He was a Morgan Stanley Professor of Economics and a rector at Moscow's New Economic School until he resigned on 30 April 2013 and fled to France.
Go to Profile#539
Christopher Udry
#17341
Overall Influence
Christopher R. Udry is an American economist who currently serves as King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. Udry is the co-founder and current co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management. Udry's research focuses mostly on development economics, in particular rural development in Sub-Saharan Africa, to which he owes his position as one of the world's most prominent agricultural economists.
Go to Profile#540
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
#2141
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a Nigerian-American economist, who has been serving as the Director-General of the World Trade Organization since March 2021. Notably, she is the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organization as Director-General. She sits on boards of: Danone, Standard Chartered Bank, MINDS: Mandela Institute for Development Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, One Campaign, GAVI: Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, Rockefeller Foundation, R4D: Results for Development, ARC: African Risk ...
Go to Profile#541
David Landes
#6437
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
David Saul Landes was a professor of economics and of history at Harvard University. He is the author of Bankers and Pashas, Revolution in Time, The Unbound Prometheus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Dynasties. Such works have received both praise for detailed retelling of economic history, as well as scorn on charges of Eurocentrism, a charge he openly embraced, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis.
Go to Profile#542
Frank Ackerman
#13777
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
Francis Hopkirk Ackerman was an American economist known for his work in environmental economics, particularly in the areas of climate change and development. He is also known as a founder of the magazine Dollars & Sense.
Go to Profile#543
Shang-Jin Wei
#17761
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Shang-Jin Wei is the N. T. Wang Professor of Chinese Business and Economy and Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School. At Columbia University, Wei is also affiliated with the School of International and Public Affairs and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. His research covers international finance, trade, macroeconomics, and China, and he writes and speaks frequently in the area of U.S.-China economic integration and other international finance and trade issues.
Go to Profile#544
Ross McKitrick
#22510
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ross McKitrick is a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis. He is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, and a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.
Go to Profile#545
Jesse Shapiro
#9603
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jesse M. Shapiro is an American economist and academic. He is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University, having previously held the George S. and Nancy B. Parker Professorship at Brown University. In 2021, Shapiro was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#546
Rudolf Meidner
#5882
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Rudolf Alfred Meidner was a Swedish economist and socialist. Biography Son of Alfred Meidner and Elise Bandmann, Meidner was born on 23 June 1914 in Breslau, Silesia. He was forced to flee Nazi Germany after the Reichstag fire in Berlin 1933, being Jewish and a socialist.
Go to Profile#547
Ravi Batra
#5477
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Raveendra Nath "Ravi" Batra is an Indian-American economist, author, and professor at Southern Methodist University. Batra is the author of six bestselling books, two of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with one reaching No. 1 in late 1987. His books center on his idea that financial capitalism breeds excessive inequality and political corruption, which inevitably succumbs to financial crisis and economic depression. In his works, Batra proposes an equitable distribution system known as Progressive Utilization Theory as a means to not only ensure material welfare but a...
Go to Profile#548
Gregory Clark
#10146
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gregory Clark is an economic historian at the University of Southern Denmark. He is known for his economic research on the industrial revolution and social mobility. Biography Clark, whose grandfathers were migrants to Scotland from Ireland, was born in Bellshill, Scotland. He attended Holy Cross High School in Hamilton. In 1974 he and fellow pupil Paul Fitzpatrick won the Scottish Daily Express schools debating competition. He earned a BA degree in economics and philosophy at King's College, Cambridge in 1979 and a PhD in economics at Harvard University in 1985. He has also taught as an assi...
Go to Profile#549
Leland B. Yeager
#9697
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Leland Bennett Yeager was an American economist dealing with monetary policy and international trade. Biography Yeager graduated from Oberlin College in 1948 with an A.B. and was granted an M.A. from Columbia University in 1949 and a Ph.D. from there in 1952. He had previously served in the United States Army in World War II, translating Japanese codes. He temporarily served as the Vice President of the Interlingua Institute from 1997 to 1998 after Deanna Hammond died. He was a regular contributor to Liberty magazine and an occasional contributor to the "Mises Daily".
Go to Profile#550
Franklin Allen
#9366
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Franklin Allen, is a British economist and academic. Since 2014, he has been professor of finance and economics, and executive director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London. He was the Nippon Life Professor of Finance and Economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most active in the research areas of financial innovations, asset price bubbles, the comparison of financial systems, and financial crises.
Go to Profile