Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Economics,

#601

James D. Hamilton

#21484

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

James Douglas Hamilton is an American econometrician currently teaching at University of California, San Diego. His work is especially influential in time series and energy economics. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983.

#602

Charles Schultze

Charles Schultze

#15961

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Charles Louis Schultze was an American economist and public policy analyst. He served as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the President Carter Administration. Schultze was appointed the Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and was the director from 1965 until 1968 during President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda. He was also a veteran of World War II, during which he served in the army.

#603

Herschel Grossman

#22058

Overall Influence

1939 - 2004 (65 years)

Herschel Ivan Grossman was an American economist best known for his work on general disequilibrium with Robert Barro in the 1970s and later work on property rights and the emergence of the state. Life and career Grossman grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended Central High School. He received a bachelor of arts from the University of Virginia , a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford , where he was a student at Merton College, and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University . Grossman collaborated with Barro to produce the influential article "A General Disequilibrium Model of Income," which,...

#604

Kotaro Suzumura

Kotaro Suzumura

#13743

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Kotaro Suzumura was a Japanese economist and professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University and Waseda University. He graduated from Hitotsubashi University in 1966. His research interests were in social choice theory and welfare economics. He was also a Fellow of the Econometric Society.　He was named a Person of Cultural Merit in 2017.

#605

Walter Oi

#17829

Overall Influence

1929 - 2013 (84 years)

Walter Yasuo Oi was the Elmer B. Milliman Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, and a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. He is credited with providing the economic basis for a voluntary military and the elimination of a draft.

#606

Stewart Myers

#4789

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Stewart Clay Myers is the Robert C. Merton Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is notable for his work on capital structure and innovations in capital budgeting and valuation, and has had a "remarkable influence" on both the theory and practice of corporate finance. Myers, in fact, coined the term "real option". He is the co-author with Richard A. Brealey and Franklin Allen of Principles of Corporate Finance, a widely used and cited business school textbook, now in its 11th edition. He is also the author of dozens of research articles.

#607

Louis Lévy-Garboua

#10319

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Louis Lévy-Garboua is a French economist whose work focuses on behavioral economics and microeconomics. He is a distinguished professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the Paris School of Economics.

#608

Costas Azariadis

#15345

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Constantine Christos "Costas" Azariadis is a macroeconomist born in Athens, Greece. He has worked on numerous topics, such as labor markets, business cycles, and economic growth and development. Azariadis originated and developed implicit contract theory.

#609

Oleg Itskhoki

#22294

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Oleg Itskhoki is a Russian-American economist specialized on macroeconomics and international economics and a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the John Bates Clark Medal for his "fundamental contributions to both international finance and international trade" in 2022.

#610

Donald Shoup

#12951

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Donald Curran Shoup is an American engineer and professor in urban planning. He is a research professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles and a noted Georgist economist. His 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking identifies the negative repercussions of off-street parking requirements and relies heavily on 'Georgist' insights about optimal land use and rent distribution. In 2015, the American Planning Association awarded Shoup the "National Planning Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer."

#611

Niko Paech

#13529

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Niko Paech is a German economist. Since 2018, he has worked as a supernumerary professor at the University of Siegen. From 2010 to 2018, he was substitute professor at the chair of production and environment at the University of Oldenburg. His research focuses on the fields of environmental economics, ecological economics and sustainability.

#612

Thomas Philippon

#11327

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Thomas Philippon is a French economist and professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business. Career Philippon earned a MA in Physics in 1997 from École Polytechnique, a Master in Economics in 1998 from the Paris School of Economics, and a PhD in Economics in 2003 from MIT. In 2003 he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Finance at Stern, and he has been a Professor of Finance since 2014.

#613

John Eatwell, Baron Eatwell

#13493

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

John Leonard Eatwell, Baron Eatwell, is a British economist who was President of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1996 to 2020. A former senior advisor to the Labour Party, Lord Eatwell sat in the House of Lords as a non-affiliated peer from 2014 to 2020, before returning to the Labour bench.

#614

Torsten Persson

#16139

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Torsten Persson is a Swedish economist who is the Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University and Centennial Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and has held visiting positions at leading universities as Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley.

#615

Karen Dynan

#20928

Overall Influence

Karen Dynan is an American economist who is Professor of the Practice of Economics at Harvard University and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the United States Department of the Treasury, having been nominated to that position by President Barack Obama in August 2013 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in June 2014. From 2009 to 2013, Dr. Dynan was the Vice President and Co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

#616

Chi-fu Huang

#19409

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Chi-fu Huang is a private investor, a retired hedge fund manager, and a former finance academic. He has made contributions to the theory of financial economics, writing on dynamic general equilibrium theory, intertemporal utility theory, and the theory of individual consumption and portfolio decisions.

#617

David Neumark

#15396

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

David Neumark is an American economist and a Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute.

#618

David Soskice

#11170

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

David William Soskice, FBA is a British political economist and academic. He is currently the LSE School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the London School of Economics. Early life and education Soskice was born as son of the British Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice and his wife Susan Isabella Cloudsley Soskice in London. He shares his first name with his grandfather, the Russian revolutionary journalist , who had fled to England. His paternal grandmother was Juliet Catherine Emma Soskice , daughter of Francis Hueffer and Catherine Madox Brown, sister of Ford Madox Ford and...

#619

Thorsten Hens

#13899

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Thorsten Hens is a German and Swiss economist and finance academic. According to the Handelsblatt ranking, Hens is among the top 10 economics professors in the German-speaking area . Biography Hens is Swiss Finance Institute Professor of Financial Economics and director of the Swiss Banking Institute at the University of Zürich, Switzerland as well as a Fellow of Centre for Economic Policy Research and an Adjunct Professor of Finance at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen.

#620

Herbert Stein

#11396

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Herbert Stein was an American economist, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a member of the board of contributors of The Wall Street Journal. He was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. From 1974 to 1984, he was the A. Willis Robertson Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia.

#621

Steven Mnuchin

#842

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Steven Terner Mnuchin is an American investment banker and film producer who served as the 77th United States secretary of the treasury as part of the Cabinet of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. Serving for a full presidential term, Mnuchin was one of the few high-profile members of Trump's cabinet whom the president did not dismiss.

#622

Linda Yueh

#16517

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Linda Yi-Chuang Yueh is a British/American economist, broadcaster, and author, born in Taiwan and of dual British and American citizenship. Yueh is an adjunct professor of economics at London Business School, and a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. She was also a Visiting Professor at Peking University and associated with both the Centre for Economic Performance and IDEAS research centres at the London School of Economics . She is a TV and radio presenter, including for BBC programmes such as Radio 4 Analysis, Business Daily on BBC World Service, and Radio 4 Today programme.

#623

Roman Frydman

#18918

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Roman Frydman is an American, Polish born economist at New York University and the author of more than ten books treating macroeconomic theory and privatization. Frydman's research, exemplified by his two recent books with Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics: Exchange Rates and Risk and Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price, Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State , argues that markets cannot be predicted accurately by deterministic optimization models, particularly models promoted by adherents of the rational expectations hypothesis. Rather, Frydman argues that predictive mo...

#624

Alan Deardorff

#18945

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Alan V. Deardorff is the John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Ann Arbor. Deardorff received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University in 1971.

#625

Raymond Crotty

#20548

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Raymond Dominick Crotty was an Irish economist, writer, academic and farmer, who was known for his opposition to Ireland's membership of the European Union. In 1987, he mounted a successful legal challenge in the Irish Supreme Court against the Government of Ireland's attempt to ratify the Single European Act without reference to the people in a referendum.

#626

Emanuel Derman

#1215

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Emanuel Derman is a South African-born academic, businessman and writer. He is best known as a quantitative analyst, and author of the book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. He is a co-author of Black–Derman–Toy model, one of the first interest-rate models, and the Derman–Kani local volatility or implied tree model, a model consistent with the volatility smile.

#627

Edward O. Thorp

#996

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Edward Oakley Thorp is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.

#628

William Landes

#9274

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

William M. Landes is an American economist who has written about the economic analysis of law and an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which cited him for his work in the field. He is among the most cited law professors in American law reviews. Landes also is the original founder of Lexecon , a legal and economic consulting firm.

#629

David E. Bloom

#14822

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David E. Bloom is an American author, professor, economist, and demographer. He is a Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health, and director of the Program on the Global Demography of Aging. He is widely considered as one of the greatest multidisciplinary social science researchers of the world.

#630

Ailsa McKay

#14127

Overall Influence

1963 - 2014 (51 years)

Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She was noted for her research on gender inequalities and the economics of the welfare state, for her contributions to feminist economics, as a leading proponent of the universal basic income concept and as one of the UK's foremost experts on gender budgeting. She served as Vice Dean of the Glasgow School for Business and Society, and was also well known for her support of Scottish independence and as a key adviser to the Scottish government and First Minister Alex Salmond on economic and welfare state policies.

#631

Jörg Guido Hülsmann

Jörg Guido Hülsmann

#11633

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jörg Guido Hülsmann is a German-born economist who studies issues related to money, banking, monetary policy, macroeconomics, and financial markets. Hülsmann is professor of economics at the University of Angers’ School of Law, Economics, and Management.

#632

Alice Amsden

#15087

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Alice Hoffenberg Amsden was a political economist and scholar of state-led economic development. For the last two decades of her career, she was the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#633

Oriana Bandiera

Oriana Bandiera

#14100

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Oriana Bandiera, FBA is an Italian economist and academic, specialising in development economics. She has been Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics since 2009. She is currently the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and co-editor of Econometrica. Her area of study primarily concerns organizations and labor markets, and their relationship with the process of economic development.

#634

Julia Cagé

#10122

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Julia Cagé is a French economist specializing in development economics, political economy, and economic history. Early life Julia Cagé has a twin sister, Agathe Cagé, who is a technocrat and an advisor to Najat Vallaud-Belkacem.

#635

Jeffrey G. Williamson

#11004

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Jeffrey Gale Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics , Harvard University; an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin ; Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Research Fellow for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He also served as the president of the Economic History Association. His research focus is and has been on comparative economic history and the history of the international economy and development. Economist Hilary Williamson Hoynes is his daughter.

#636

Eric Hanushek

#3659

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Eric Alan Hanushek is an economist who has written prolifically on public policy with a special emphasis on the economics of education. Since 2000, he has been a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American public policy think tank located at Stanford University in California. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.

#637

John Williamson

#10499

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

John Harold Williamson was a British-born economist who coined the term Washington Consensus. He served as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 1981 until his retirement in 2012. During that time, he was the project director for the United Nations High-Level Panel on Financing for Development in 2001. He was also on leave as chief economist for South Asia at the World Bank during 1996–99, adviser to the International Monetary Fund from 1972 to 1974, and an economic consultant to the UK Treasury from 1968 to 1970. He was also an economics professor at Pont...

#638

Yaroslav Kuzminov

#6845

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Yaroslav Kuzminov is a Russian economist. He was the rector of the Higher School of Economics from 1992 to 2021.

#639

Peter Leeson

#8481

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Peter T. Leeson is an American economist and the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. In 2012 Big Think listed him among "Eight of the World's Top Young Economists". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

#640

Tim Jackson

#9502

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Tim Jackson is a British ecological economist and professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey. He is the director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity , a multi-disciplinary, international research consortium which aims to understand the economic, social and political dimensions of sustainable prosperity. Tim Jackson is the author of Prosperity Without Growth and Material Concerns . In 2016, he received the Hillary Laureate for exceptional mid-career Leadership. His most recent book Post Growth—Life After Capitalism was published in March 2021 b...

#641

Bernard van Praag

#24156

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Bernard Marinus Siegfried van Praag is a Dutch economist, and distinguished university professor at the University of Amsterdam, noted for researching the measurement of welfare, as well-being and happiness.

#642

Étienne Wasmer

#33992

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Étienne Wasmer is a French professor and economist currently holding a Professorship at New York University in Abu Dhabi. Wasmer mainly focuses on the fields of labor economics, job search theory, discrimination and human capital. He teaches microeconomics and labor economics.

#643

Mario Blejer

#14676

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mario J. Blejer is an Argentine economist and a former president of the Central Bank of Argentina. Life and times Blejer was born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1948. He enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and graduated cum laude with degrees in Economics and Jewish History in 1970, as well as with a master's degree in Economics from the same institution, in 1972. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in the latter discipline at the University of Chicago , and joined the Boston University Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor, where he remained until 1980.

#644

Murray Milgate

#21293

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Murray Milgate , is an Australian-born academic economist and Sometime Fellow and director of studies in economics at Queens' College in the University of Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. He is the co-creator and co-editor of the celebrated original edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics together with John Eatwell and Peter Newman.

#645

D. Gale Johnson

#24488

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

David Gale Johnson was an American economist and an expert on Russia and China. Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions. Johnson was chairman of the department of economics at the University of Chicago and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The New York Times called him "a pioneer in agricultural economics". The University of Chicago called him "one of the world's most eminent researchers of agricultural and development economics".

#646

Daniele Archibugi

Daniele Archibugi

#3525

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Daniele Archibugi is an Italian economic and political theorist. He works on the economics and policy of innovation and technological change, on the political theory of international relations and on political and technological globalisation.

#647

Takeshi Amemiya

#20661

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Takeshi Amemiya is an economist specializing in econometrics and the economy of ancient Greece. Amemiya is the Edward Ames Edmonds Professor of Economics and a Professor of Classics at Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Statistical Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

#648

Nancy Folbre

#11137

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#649

Basil Moore

#29033

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Basil John Moore was a Canadian post-Keynesian economist, best known for developing and promoting endogenous money theory, particularly the proposition that the money supply curve is horizontal, rather than upward sloping, a proposition known as horizontalism. He was the most vocal proponent of this theory, and is considered a central figure in post Keynesian economics

#650

Frederic M. Scherer

#10639

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Frederic Michael Scherer is an American economist and expert on industrial organization. Since 2006, he continues as a professor of economics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. Early and family life Scherer received his A.B. degree with honors and distinction from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. with high distinction from Harvard University in 1958 and his PhD in economics from Harvard in 1963.

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