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 people in Economics,
#551
Stanley Reiter
#9557
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Stanley Reiter was an American author, economist, and Emeritus Professor at Northwestern University. Reiter was a leading pioneer in the field of mechanism design. In 2006, he and the 2007 Nobel prize-winning economist Leonid Hurwicz authored the book Designing Economic Mechanisms.
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Richard Florida
#1001
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard L. Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU's School of Professional Studies.
Go to Profile#553
Laurence Boone
#10889
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Laurence Boone is a French economist who has been serving as the Secretary of State for European affairs in the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne since 2022. Boone’s fields of interest include macroeconomics, European politics and public finance. She served as an economic advisor to President François Hollande between July 2014 and March 2016.
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Katy Milkman
#10464
Overall Influence
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
Go to Profile#555
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas
#15597
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is a French economist who currently works as S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Management at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also directs the Clausen Center for International Business and Policy and is affiliated with the Haas School of Business. His research focuses on macroeconomics, in particular international macroeconomics and international finance. In 2008, Gourinchas received the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France.
Go to Profile#556
Yves Balasko
#15046
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Yves Balasko is a French economist working in England. He was born in Paris on 9 August 1945 to a Hungarian father and a French mother. After studying mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris he became interested in economics. He subsequently spent six years at Électricité de France where he was involved in the application of the theory of marginal cost pricing to electricity pricing. While at Électricité de France, he proved his first results on the structure of the equilibrium manifold in the theory of general equilibrium. After completing his dissertation on "L'équilibre économ...
Go to Profile#557
Sidney G. Winter
#12580
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Sidney Graham Winter is an American economist and Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is recognized as a leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics.
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Yongcheol Shin
#16842
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Yongcheol Shin is a South Korean-born British economist at the University of York. He has previously held positions at leading academic institutions such as University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh and University of Leeds. His notable contributions to econometrics include asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag model, unit root tests in ESTAR framework, and the long-run structural VAR modelling approach.
Go to Profile#559
Stephen Marglin
#14936
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stephen Alan Marglin is an American economist. He is the Walter S. Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a founding member of the World Economics Association.
Go to Profile#560
Martín Guzmán
#22263
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Martín Maximiliano Guzmán is an Argentine economist, who served as Minister of Economy in the cabinet of President Alberto Fernández from December 2019 to July 2022. Early life and education Martín Maximiliano Guzmán was born on 12 October 1982 in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province. Guzmán studied at the National University of La Plata, where he graduated with a degree of Licenciate in Economics in 2005, then going on to receive a Master of Science in Economics in 2007. In 2013 he earned a doctorate on Economics from Brown University. His theoretical influences include Carlos Daniel Heymann and ...
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Karl E. Case
#6049
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Karl Edwin "Chip" Case was professor of economics emeritus at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States, where he held the Coman and Hepburn Chair in Economics and taught for 34 years. He was a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and was president of the Boston Economic Club 2011-12. Case was also a founding partner in the real estate research firm of Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., which created the S&P Case Shiller Index of home prices. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Depositors Insurance Fund of Massachusetts.
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Sebastián Edwards
#12751
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sebastián Edwards a member of the Edwards family is a Chilean economist, professor, speaker, and consultant. He is currently the Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles . From 1993 until April 1996, he was the Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research , a member of the advisory board of Transnational Research Corporation and co-chairman of the Inter American Seminar on Economics .
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Michael Clemens
#4301
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Michael Andrew Clemens is an American economist who studies international migration and global economic development. He is a full professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He is also affiliated with IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London, and is a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.
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Frederic Pryor
#8681
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Frederic LeRoy Pryor was an American economist. While studying in Berlin during the partition of the city in 1961, he was imprisoned in East Germany for six months, then released in a Cold War "spy swap" that also involved downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He spent the bulk of his career as a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, as a professor of economics.
Go to Profile#565
Alfred E. Kahn
#4620
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Alfred Edward Kahn was an American economist and political advisor who specialized in regulation and deregulation. He was an important influence in the deregulation of the airline and energy industries. Commonly known as the "Father of Airline Deregulation," he chaired the Civil Aeronautics Board during the period when it ended its regulation of the airline industry, paving the way for low-cost airlines, from People Express to Southwest Airlines.
Go to Profile#566
John R. Harris
#22863
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
John Rees Harris , Professor of Economics at Boston University, was an American economist known for his work in the field of development economics. Harris earned a PhD in economics from Northwestern University in 1967. Harris was an African Development economist. His work on labor markets and wages, embodied in the Harris-Todaro Model is a foundation of contemporary Development Economics, and was constructed based on observations of Nigerian and Kenyan labor markets. Harris directly worked for numerous governmental and non-governmental agencies including USAID, World Bank, International Labor...
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Pavlina R. Tcherneva
#19072
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an American economist, of Bulgarian descent, working as associate professor of economics at Bard College. She is also a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute and expert at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
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David B. Audretsch
#6690
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David Bruce Audretsch is an American economist. He is a distinguished professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University and also serves as director of the SPEA International Office, Ameritech Chair of Economic Development, and director of SPEA's Institute for Development Strategies . He is co-founder and co-editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, and also works as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the EU Commission, and the U.S. Department of State. He was the director of the Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany from 2003 to 2009.
Go to Profile#569
Markus Brunnermeier
#11045
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Markus Konrad Brunnermeier is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Brunnermeier is a faculty member of Princeton's department of economics and director of the Bendheim Center for Finance. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Brunnermeier is also the president of the American Finance Association in 2023.
Go to Profile#570
Ronald Oaxaca
#27828
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ronald L. Oaxaca is the McClelland Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His areas of research include labor economics, applied econometrics and applied microeconomics. Oaxaca graduated from California State University, Fresno in 1965, and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1971.
Go to Profile#571
Roque Fernández
#12198
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roque Benjamín Fernández is an Argentine economist, former President of the Central Bank and Minister of Economy, and the only member of the Chicago Boys ever to have been the chief economic policy maker in Argentina.
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Naomi Lamoreaux
#11744
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Naomi Raboy Lamoreaux is an American economic historian, specializing in US business and technological history. She is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History of Economics and History at Yale University and an emeritus professor at UCLA and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has worked widely on business, economic, and financial history with perhaps her most noted works being her 1988 book The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and her 1996 book Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and her Economic Development in Industrial New England.
Go to Profile#573
Nancy Birdsall
#10422
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nancy Birdsall is an American economist, the founding president of the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded CGD in November 2001 with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott Jr. and served as president until 2016. Prior to becoming the President of CGD, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as the reform of the international financial institutions.
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Kevin O'Rourke
#7762
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, is an Irish economist and historian, who specialises in economic history and international economics. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was Professor of Economics at Trinity College, Dublin from 2000 to 2011, and had previously taught at Columbia University and University College, Dublin. From 2011 to 2019, he was Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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Steven M. Sheffrin
#25450
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Steven M. Sheffrin is an economist who focuses on property tax limitations in the United States. He is the Director Emeritus of Tulane University’s Murphy Institute and a professor of economics. Sheffrin is an expert in state taxation and served as a member on Louisiana's state Task Force on the Structural Changes in Budget and Tax Policy in 2016.
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Nathan Nunn
#13206
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Nathan Nunn is an economist and Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. He is best known for his research on the long-term effects of slave trade on Africa. His research interests include economic development, cultural economics, political economy and international trade.
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N. K. Singh
#6258
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Nand Kishore Singh is an Indian politician, economist and former Indian Administrative Service officer. He is a senior member of the Bharatiya Janata Party since March 2014 after having served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from Bihar for the Janata Dal . He has been a senior bureaucrat, Member of the Planning Commission and handled assignments of Union Expenditure and Revenue Secretary. He was also Officer on Special Duty to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
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Lance Taylor
#19812
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Lance Jerome Taylor was an American economist who was known for his contributions to structuralist macroeconomics. He was the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development and director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research
Go to Profile#579
Roy Radner
#16676
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Roy Radner was Leonard N. Stern School Professor of Business at New York University. He was a micro-economic theorist. Radner's research interests included strategic analysis of climate change, bounded rationality, game-theoretic models of corruption, pricing of information goods and statistical theory of data mining. Previously he was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
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David Cass
#11864
Overall Influence
1937 - 2008 (71 years)
David Cass was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, mostly known for his contributions to general equilibrium theory. His most famous work was on the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model of economic growth.
Go to Profile#581
Markos Mamalakis
#25740
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Markos Mamalakis is a Greek economist specialising in development economics, particularly in Latin America. Born in Salonika, he graduated from the Experimental High School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1950, then attended the Law School of the University and received a B.A. in Law, with the distinction summa cum laude in 1955. He did graduate work at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1955 to 1957, and University of California, Berkeley from 1957 to 1962, where he received his M.A. , and Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled Inflation and Growth: An Asset Preference Analysis.
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Jared Bernstein
#8896
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jared Bernstein is an American economist who is the chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers. He is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama Administration. In 2008, Michael D. Shear described Bernstein as a progressive and "a strong advocate for workers".
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Thomas Straubhaar
#15428
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Thomas Straubhaar is a Swiss economist and migration researcher. He is a professor for international economic relations at the University of Hamburg. Life and career Straubhaar was born on August 2, 1957, in Unterseen, Bern, in Switzerland.
Go to Profile#584
Clemens Fuest
#13638
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Clemens Fuest is a German economist who has been President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and director of the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich since 2016. Career Between 2008 and 2013, Fuest was a professor of business taxation at the University of Oxford and Research Director of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, which is part of the Saïd Business School. In 2008, he served as a member of the Independent Expert Group to the Commission on Scottish Devolution. He was member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors at the German Feder...
Go to Profile#585
Alex Tabarrok
#7458
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alexander Taghi Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist. Tabarrok is a professor at Virginia's George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the school's Mercatus Center. With Tyler Cowen, he co-authors the economics blog Marginal Revolution. Tabarrok and Cowen have also ventured into online education with Marginal Revolution University.
Go to Profile#586
Michael Grossman
#14522
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Grossman is an American health economist and economics professor emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate Center . He directed the Health Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1972 to 2020. Grossman was an early contributor to New Home Economics .
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Richard Baldwin
#9594
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard E. Baldwin is a professor of international economics at the IMD Business School and emeritus professor of international economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He was the former President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research . He is Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU, which he founded in June 2007. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was twice elected as a Member of the Council of the European Economic Association. Baldwin has been called "one of the most important thinkers in this era of global disruption"...
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Michel Aglietta
#6664
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michel Aglietta is a French economist, currently Professor of Economics at the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Michel Aglietta is a scientific counsellor at CEPII, a member of the University Institute of France, and a consultant to Groupama. An alumnus of the École Polytechnique, from 1998 to 2006, he was a member of the Circle of economists. From 1997 to 2003, he was a member of the Council of economic analysis for the French Prime Minister. His monograph A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience laid the foundation for the regulation school of economics. He is a teacher at HEC...
Go to Profile#589
Lars Calmfors
#17883
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lars Calmfors is a Swedish economist and professor of international economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University. He received his Ph.D. from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1978. He headed the official Swedish Government Commission on the EMU, which in 1996 recommended to wait with introducing the euro. In 2003 when Sweden held a referendum on whether to join the EMU, Calmfors advocated in favor of joining.
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Daniel B. Klein
#11248
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Daniel Bruce Klein is an American professor of economics at George Mason University and an Associate Fellow of the Swedish Ratio Institute. Much of his research examines the works of Adam Smith, public policy questions, libertarian political philosophy, and the sociology of academia. He is the chief editor of Econ Journal Watch.
Go to Profile#591
Charles E. Lindblom
#5782
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Charles Edward Lindblom was an American academic who studied economics at the University of Chicago and was Sterling Professor emeritus of political science and economics at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, as well as director of Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies.
Go to Profile#592
Martin Eichenbaum
#23502
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Martin Stewart Eichenbaum is the Charles Moskos professor of economics at Northwestern University, and the co-director of the Center for International Economics and Development. His research focuses on macroeconomics, international economics, and monetary theory and policy.
Go to Profile#593
Anthony J. Culyer
#17318
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Anthony John Culyer CBE is a British economist, and emeritus professor of economics at the University of York, visiting professor at Imperial College London and adjunct professor in health policy, evaluation and management at the University of Toronto, known for his work in the field of health economics.
Go to Profile#594
Roger Bootle
#19225
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roger Bootle is a British economist and a weekly columnist for The Daily Telegraph. He is the chairman of Capital Economics, an independent macroeconomic research consultancy. He and Capital Economics were awarded the Wolfson Economics Prize in 2012.
Go to Profile#595
Michael Greenstone
#19911
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Michael Greenstone is an American economist and the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, the College, and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He serves as director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago , director of the Becker Friedman Institute, and co-chair of the Energy and Environment sector at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab . Under the first Obama administration, he served as chief economist on the Council of Economic Advisors. His research interests focus on the nexus between development economics and envi...
Go to Profile#596
Graeme Snooks
#13077
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Graeme Donald Snooks is a systems theorist and stratologist who has developed a general dynamic theory to explain complex living systems. His resulting "dynamic-strategy theory" has been employed to analyse the fluctuating fortunes of life over the past 4,000 million years and of human society over the past 2 myrs; to analyse contemporary economic problems ; to explore socio-political issues ; to analyse the emergence, operation, and malfunction of the mind; and to make scientific predictions about the future. New discoveries emerging from Snooks' publications include: existential schizophre...
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David Gordon
#23439
Overall Influence
1944 - 1996 (52 years)
David M. Gordon was an American economist and Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He founded the Institute for Labor Education and Research in 1975 and later the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis in New York City. Gordon worked to disseminate progressive economic ideas to the general public and to contribute to the development of a left-political movement in the United States. Gordon's work dealt mainly with discrimination and labor market segmentation. He coined the term social structure of accumulation which gave rise to an extens...
Go to Profile#598
Geoffrey Harcourt
#23021
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Geoffrey Colin Harcourt was an Australian academic economist and leading member of the post-Keynesian school. He studied at the University of Melbourne and then at King's College, Cambridge. Biography After studying economics at the University of Melbourne he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he received his doctorate. In 1958, he moved to the University of Adelaide as a lecturer and was appointed to a chair in Economics at Adelaide in 1967. . He was a University Lecturer and Reader in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge and a Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics, Jesus Col...
Go to Profile#599
Alexander Nove
#15011
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Alexander Nove, FRSE, FBA was a Professor of Economics at the University of Glasgow and a noted authority on Russian and Soviet economic history. According to Ian D. Thatcher, "[T]he consensus is that he was one of the most significant scholars of 'Soviet' studies in its widest sense and beyond."
Go to Profile#600
Mark Thoma
#13254
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mark Allen Thoma is a macroeconomist and econometrician and a professor of economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Oregon. Thoma is best known as a regular columnist for The Fiscal Times through his blog "Economist's View", which Paul Krugman called "the best place by far to keep up with the latest in economic discourse", and as an analyst at CBS MoneyWatch. He is also a regular contributor to EconoMonitor.
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