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,
#651
Cormac Ó Gráda
#8762
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#652
Joachim Weimann
#33951
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Joachim Weimann is a German economist. He is currently the chair for Economic Policy at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Weimann's research interests include environmental economics and behavioral economics.
Go to Profile#653
Joseph J. Spengler
#16961
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Joseph John Spengler was an American economist, statistician, and historian of economic thought. A recipient of the 1951 John Frederick Lewis Award of the American Philosophical Society and the 1981 Distinguished Fellow Award from the History of Economics Society, he was Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#654
Robert M. Townsend
#15910
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Morris Townsend is an American economist and professor; he is the Elizabeth & James Killian Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining MIT, he was the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago where he remained a research associate until 2018.
Go to Profile#655
Jan Pen
#18861
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Jan Pen was a Dutch economist, professor and columnist. He is author of several books on economics. Life and work Pen studied at the University of Amsterdam, where in 1950 he received his PhD with a thesis concerning the theory of collective wage negotiations. He was Director General Economic Policy at the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In 1956 he was appointed professor of political economy and the theory of public finance at the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen. He published in 1959 Moderne Economie , for years the general introduction to macroeconomics in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#656
Birger Wernerfelt
#10978
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Birger Wernerfelt is a Danish economist and management theorist, and JC Penney Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is best known for “A Resource-based View of the Firm” , which is one of the most cited papers in the social sciences.
Go to Profile#657
Otmar Issing
#8000
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Otmar Issing is a German economist who served as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2006 and concurrently as ECB chief economist. He developed the 'two-pillar' approach to monetary policy decision-making that the ECB has adopted. After leaving the executive board, Issing been serving as president of the Center for Financial Studies since 2006.
Go to Profile#658
Steve Hanke
#4849
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Steve H. Hanke is an American economist and professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is also a senior fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University's Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise in Baltimore, Maryland.
Go to Profile#659
Giovanni Arrighi
#4414
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Go to Profile#660
Serge Latouche
#7945
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Serge Latouche is a French emeritus professor of economics at the University of Paris-Sud. He holds a degree in political sciences, philosophy and economy. Work Latouche is a specialist in North-South economic and cultural relations, and in the epistemology of the social sciences. He has developed a critical theory towards economic orthodoxy. He denounces economism, utilitarianism in social sciences, consumer society and the notion of sustainable development. He particularly criticizes the notions of economic efficiency and economic rationalism. He is one of the thinkers and most renowned partisans of the degrowth theory.
Go to Profile#661
Kenneth G. Elzinga
#16899
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Kenneth G. Elzinga is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. He is an antitrust expert and co-authored a highly successful quartet of murder mystery novels in which the sleuth, dubbed Henry Spearman, solves the murder using principles of economics.
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Simon Gächter
#14490
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Simon Gächter is an Austrian economist. He currently is professor of the psychology of economic decision making at the University of Nottingham. Gächter attended the University of Vienna, where he received his doctoral degree in economics in 1994. He earned his habilitation at the University of Zürich in 1999.
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Teun Kloek
#22114
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Teunis Kloek is a Dutch economist and Emeritus Professor of Econometrics at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam. His research interests centered on econometric methods and their applications, especially nonparametric and robust methods in econometrics.
Go to Profile#664
Enrique Leff
#6038
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Enrique Leff is a Mexican economist, environmental sociologist and environmentalist. He has written 25 books and 180 articles on political ecology, environmental sociology, environmental economics, environmental epistemology and environmental education. He is regarded as one of the key environmental thinkers in Latin America.
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Hervé Moulin
#20854
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Hervé Moulin is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. He is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
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Neil Shephard
#19219
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Neil Shephard , FBA, is an econometrician, currently Frank B. Baird Jr., Professor of Science in the Department of Economics and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. His most well known contributions are: the formalisation of the econometrics of realised volatility, which nonparametrically estimates the volatility of asset prices, the introduction of the auxiliary particle filter , the nonparametric identification of jumps in financial economics, through multipower variation, stochastic volatility models based on non-Gaussian Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, known as 'Barndorff...
Go to Profile#667
John Richard Sir Hicks
#38791
Overall Influence
#668
Roland McKean
#18327
Overall Influence
1917 - 1993 (76 years)
Roland Neely McKean is an American economist. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Chicago. From 1951 to 1963, he was a research economist at the RAND Corporation, where he and Charles J. Hitch developed the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System , which was first implemented by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson extended adoption of PPBS to all executive departments.
Go to Profile#669
Tito Boeri
#12386
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Tito Michele Boeri is an Italian economist, currently professor of economics at Bocconi University, Milan and acts as Scientific Director of the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti. Biography Born in Milan, Boeri obtained his Ph.D. in economics from New York University in 1990. He was senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1987 to 1996. He was also consultant to the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, the International Labour Organization, the World Bank and the Italian Government. Currently he is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Institute for the Study of Labor and Igier-Bocconi.
Go to Profile#670
W. Kip Viscusi
#17693
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
William Viscusi is an American economist whose primary fields of research are the economics of risk and uncertainty, risk and environmental regulation, behavioral economics, and law and economics. Viscusi is the University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt Law School where he and his wife, Joni Hersch, are the founders and co-directors of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Viscusi was the first John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School and Director of the Harvard Program on Empirical Legal Studies.
Go to Profile#671
James A. Robinson
#10597
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#672
Hans-Bernd Schäfer
#13996
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Hans-Bernd Schäfer is a German economist and a pioneer in the field of law and economics in Germany and Europe. Schäfer is professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg and former director of the Institute of Law & Economics. Currently he is an affiliate professor at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. He has been visiting professor at various universities abroad, including the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University faculty of law, George Mason University School of Law , and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research. He was a visiting scholar at the Univers...
Go to Profile#673
A. Mitchell Polinsky
#12682
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alan Mitchell Polinsky is the Josephine Scott Crocker Professor of Law and Economics at Stanford Law School. At Stanford, Polinsky is the founder and director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. He is also a past president of the American Law and Economics Association.
Go to Profile#674
François Bourguignon
#10156
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
François Bourguignon is the former Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has been the Director of the Paris School of Economics, and from 1985 to his retirement in 2013 a professor of economics at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. in 2016 Bourguignon was awarded the Dan David Prize. He focuses on the study of income and wealth inequality, economy-wide country studies , international trade and trade policy, education, wealth, income, redistribution, and tax policy.
Go to Profile#675
Wallace E. Oates
#25705
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Wallace E. Oates was a Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He taught in the fields of public economics and environmental economics, and was considered a major international figure in both fields. His first book was Fiscal Federalism and he authored numerous other books and articles, including The Theory of Environmental Policy , coauthored with William J. Baumol. A Festschrift, Environmental and public economics : essays in honor of Wallace E. Oates, was published in his honor in 1999, and an additional volume of his selected essays in 2004. Anoth...
Go to Profile#676
Lawrence Mishel
#13993
Overall Influence
Lawrence Mishel is distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a pro-labor think-tank that seeks to advance the interests of American workers. He has been at EPI since 1987, first serving as Research Director, then as Vice-president and then as president from 2002 to 2017.
Go to Profile#677
Nancy Qian
#12160
Overall Influence
Nancy Qian is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor in the Kellogg School of Management Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy and economic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy.
Go to Profile#678
Clayton Christensen
#3763
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
Clayton Magleby Christensen was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Christensen introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, and it led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time." He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School , and was also a leader and writer in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He was one of the founders o...
Go to Profile#679
Guy Sorman
#10147
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Guy Sorman is a French-American professor, columnist, author, and public intellectual in economics and philosophy. Biography Guy Sorman has written twenty books that promote the ideals of creativity and modern capitalism. His views are close to classical liberalism. He is assertive in regard to human rights in China and in regard to democracy in many places including Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Chile, Poland, and Argentina. Sorman was a founder of a French NGO, Action against Hunger , in 1979 and was its President until 1990, when he became its Honorary President. He was an advisor to former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.
Go to Profile#680
Willem Buiter
#10132
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Willem Hendrik Buiter CBE is an American-British economist. He spent most of his career as an academic, teaching at various universities. More recently, he was Chief Economist at Citigroup. Early life and education Buiter was born in The Hague, Netherlands on 26 September 1949. He is a national of the United States and the United Kingdom. Willem's father, Harm Buiter, was a Dutch economist, international trades union official and politician of the Labour Party , who had served as Mayor of Groningen.
Go to Profile#681
Pentti Kouri
#22528
Overall Influence
1949 - 2009 (60 years)
Pentti Juha Kalervo Kouri was a Finnish economist and venture capitalist. He was born in Kemijärvi. Education and career Kouri was the first Finn to get a scholarship to the United World College of the Atlantic. After graduating from there, he got his master's degree in economics from the University of Helsinki in 1970. In that same year, when he was 21 years old, he was hired by the International Monetary Fund. It was at IMF's research organization where Kouri first met Michael G. Porter, an Australian economist, with whom he later developed the Kouri-Porter model.
Go to Profile#682
René M. Stulz
#22148
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
René M. Stulz is a professor of finance at the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at a variety of universities including the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. He has published over 100 articles in finance and economic journals on topics ranging from corporate finance, corporate governance, asset pricing, financial institutions, and risk management, which have been cited over 47,000 times.
Go to Profile#683
Aaron Edlin
#15922
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Aaron S. Edlin is an American economist and lawyer specializing in antitrust and competition policy. In 1997–1998, he served in the Clinton White House as Senior Economist within the Council of Economic Advisers focusing on the areas of industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. In 1999, he co-founded the Berkeley Electronic Press, an electronic publishing company that assists with scholarly communication.
Go to Profile#684
Glenn Hubbard
#10280
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert Glenn Hubbard is an American economist and academic. He served as the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business from 2004 to 2019, where he remains the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics. On September 13, 2018, he announced that he would retire from his position after his contract expired on June 30, 2019. Hubbard previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 1991 to 1993, and as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003.
Go to Profile#685
Pierre Cahuc
#19182
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Pierre Cahuc is a French economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He is Program Director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics's programme "Labour Markets" and research fellow at CEPR. His research focuses mainly on labour economics and its relationship with macroeconomics. In 2001, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economic research. He belongs to the most highly cited economists in France and Europe's leading labour economists.
Go to Profile#686
Costas Meghir
#19777
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Konstantinos "Costas" Meghir is a Greek-British economist. He studied at the University of Manchester where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1985, following an MA in economics in 1980 and a BA in Economics and Econometrics in 1979. In 1997 he was awarded the Bodosakis foundation prize and in 2000 he was awarded the “Ragnar Frisch Medal” for his article “Estimating Labour Supply Responses using Tax Reforms” .
Go to Profile#687
Donald J. Boudreaux
#9456
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Donald Joseph Boudreaux is an American economist, author, professor, and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Go to Profile#688
Luc Anselin
#20980
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Luc E. Anselin is one of the developers of the field of spatial econometrics. Life and contributions Luc Anselin was previously the Regents' Professor, Walter Isard Chair and Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University where he attracted some of the leading spatial econometrics scholars. He also founded and directed the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation at ASU to develop, implement, apply, and disseminate spatial analysis methods. In 2016, the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis relocated to the University of Chicago. He ...
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Rachel McCleary
#22580
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rachel M. McCleary is a lecturer in the Economics Department at Harvard University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Biography McCleary has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, a Master of Theological Studies from Emory University and a B.A. from Indiana University. Her work is interdisciplinary with theoretical grounding in the fields of political science, sociology and economics. Within these disciplines, she conducts research on the political economy of religion. Her research focuses on how religion interacts with economic performance and the political and social behavior of individuals and institutions across societies.
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James Crotty
#30345
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
James R. Crotty was an American Post-Keynesian macroeconomist whose research in theory and policy attempts to integrate the complementary analytical strengths of the Marxian and Keynesian traditions. He has made contributions to the social structure of accumulation theory; the implications of radical uncertainty for macro theory and theories of financial markets.
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Cornelius Castoriadis
#805
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.
Go to Profile#692
Theotônio dos Santos
#13446
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Theotônio dos Santos Junior was a Brazilian economist. He was one of the formulators of the Dependency Theory and supported the World-System theory. Dos Santos had a bachelor's degree in sociology and politics in public administration from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a master's degree in political science from the University of Brasília. He received the title of notório saber in economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Fluminense Federal University, at the latter of which he was Professor Emeritus. He coordinated for both the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Polic...
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Campbell Harvey
#15110
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Campbell Russell "Cam" Harvey is a Canadian economist, known for his work on asset allocation with changing risk and risk premiums and the problem of separating luck from skill in investment management. He is currently the J. Paul Sticht Professor of International Business at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina, as well as a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a research associate with the Institute of International Integration Studies at Trinity College Dublin and a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#694
Beatrice Weder di Mauro
#12910
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Beatrice Weder di Mauro is a Swiss economist who is currently Professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Research Professor and Distinguished Fellow-in-residence at the Emerging Markets Institute of INSEAD Singapore, and senior fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research . Since 2018, she also serves as President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research .
Go to Profile#695
Abhijit Sen
#17992
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Abhijit Sen was an Indian economist who focused on studying rural development. Sen was appointed to the Planning Commission of India between 2004 and 2014 and held a number of policy making positions in India. Amongst his works included recommendations toward establishment of minimum support price for farm produce and a universal public distribution system.
Go to Profile#696
Michael Perelman
#15666
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Perelman was an American economist and economic historian, former professor of economics at California State University, Chico. Perelman has written 19 books, including Railroading Economics, Manufacturing Discontent, The Perverse Economy, and The Invention of Capitalism.
Go to Profile#697
Giovanni Dosi
#15218
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Giovanni Dosi is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. He is the Co-Director of the task forces “Industrial Policy” and “Intellectual Property” at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. Dosi is Continental European Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change. Included in ISI Highly Cited Researchers.
Go to Profile#698
Mauro Gallegati
#24557
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mauro Gallegati is an Italian New-Keynesian economist, scholar of agent-based economics, and professor at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy. Biography After having earned his PhD in economics in 1989 at Marche Polytechnic University with a thesis on financial fragility under the supervision of Hyman Minsky, Gallegati has held visiting positions, both as a scholar and as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, University of Cambridge, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Santa Fe Institute, Brookings Institution, University of...
Go to Profile#699
Mousa Ghaninejad
#10133
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mousa Ghaninejad is a senior Iranian economist. He has been an honorary visiting professor at the Sharif University of Technology and is currently a faculty member of Petroleum University of Technology. He was editor-in-chief of the daily economic newspaper, Donya-e-Eqtesad.
Go to Profile#700
Lars Ljungqvist
#20002
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Lars Ljungqvist is a Swedish economist probably best known as the author of Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, a standard graduate level textbook of modern macroeconomics, with Thomas J. Sargent. Ljungqvist is a macro economist with seminal papers on labour: European unemployment, wage structures, information asymmetries and international trade. He held teaching positions at SUNY and was senior economist at Fed Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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