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,
#701
E. J. Mishan
#27994
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Ezra J. Mishan was an English economist best known for his work criticising economic growth. Between 1956 and 1977 he worked at the London School of Economics where he became Professor of Economics. In 1965, while at the LSE, he wrote his seminal work The Costs of Economic Growth, but was unable to find a publisher until 1967. In this work he expanded on his original 1960 thesis which stated that the “precondition of sustained growth is sustained discontent”, warning developing nations that “the thorny path to industrialisation leads, after all, only to the waste land of Subtopia”. The Costs...
Go to Profile#702
Selo Soemardjan
#10205
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Selo Soemardjan , also spelled as Selo Sumarjan or Selo Sumardjan, was a well known senior academic in sociology at the University of Indonesia, and is known as the Pioneer of Indonesian Social Sciences. He was awarded with the title Kanjeng Pangeran Haryo, a knighthood from the Yogyakarta Sultanate.
Go to Profile#703
Yasheng Huang
#13370
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Yasheng Huang is an American professor in international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he founded and heads the China Lab and India Lab. His research areas include human capital formation in China and India.
Go to Profile#704
Edgar L. Feige
#13070
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Edgar L. Feige is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago he has taught at Yale University ; The University of Essex; Erasmus University and held the Cleveringa Chair, at the University of Leiden in 1981–82. He has published widely on such topics as underground and shadow economies; tax evasion; transition economics; financial transaction taxes the Automated Payment Transaction tax ; and monetary theory and policy. He has consulted with various US and international government agencies.
Go to Profile#705
Klaus M. Schmidt
#14502
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Klaus M. Schmidt is a German economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at the University of Munich . His research focuses on behavioural economics, game theory and contract theory. In 2001, Schmidt was awarded the Gossen Prize in recognition for his contributions to economic research on game theory, contract theory, and the economics of fairness. He is a member of the council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.
Go to Profile#706
Barry R. Weingast
#14216
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Barry Robert Weingast is an American political scientist and economist, who is currently the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Weingast's research concentrates on the relationship between politics and economics, particularly economic reform, regulation, and the political foundation of markets.
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William A. Brock
#23962
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Allen "Buz" Brock is a mathematical economist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1975. He is known for his application of a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory to economic theory and econometrics. In 1998, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the Economics Section.
Go to Profile#708
Donald Andrews
#28587
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Donald Wilfrid Kao Andrews is a Canadian economist. He is the Tjalling Koopmans Professor of Economics at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University. Born in Vancouver, he received his B.A. in 1977 at the University of British Columbia, his M.A. in 1980 in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in economics in 1982 also from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#709
David Newbery
#19069
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Michael Garrood Newbery, CBE, FBA , is a Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge. He got this position in 1988. He specializes in the field of energy economics, and he writes on the regulation of electricity markets. His interests also include climate change mitigation and environmental policy, privatisation, and risk.
Go to Profile#710
Didier Sornette
#9853
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Didier Sornette is a French researcher studying subjects including complex systems and risk management. He is Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and is also a professor of the Swiss Finance Institute, He was previously a Professor of Geophysics at UCLA, Los Angeles California and a Research Professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research .
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Joseph T. Salerno
#16816
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joseph T. Salerno is an American Austrian School economist who is Professor Emeritus of Economics in the Finance and Graduate Economics departments at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, Academic Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and holds the John V. Denson II Endowed Professorship in the economics department at Auburn University. He earned his B.A. at Boston College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#712
Andranik Tangian
#16439
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Andranik Semovich Tangian ; born March 29, 1952ECON Biography Andranik Tangian was born in Moscow, Soviet Union, on March 29, 1952. After the graduation from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University in 1974, he has worked at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas and the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, where he got his PhD in mathematics in 1979.
Go to Profile#713
Jianqing Fan
#10083
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Go to Profile#714
Roger Backhouse
#24860
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Roger Edward Backhouse, is a British economist, economic historian and academic. Since 1996, he has been Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Birmingham. Backhouse is an Associate Editor of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and is also Book Review Editor of the Economic Journal, an editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
Go to Profile#715
Richard Timberlake
#15353
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Go to Profile#716
Douglas Elmendorf
#9748
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Douglas William Elmendorf is an American economist who is the dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He previously served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2009 to 2015. He was a Brookings Institution senior fellow from 2007 to 2009, and briefly in 2015 following his time at the CBO, and was a director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings.
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Richard Parker
#18019
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Parker is an economist from the United States. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Oxford, and has worked for the United Nations Development Programme. Parker co-founded Mother Jones magazine and is on the editorial board of The Nation. He wrote the books The Myth of the Middle Class, Mixed Signals: the Future of Global Television News, and John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.
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Robin Hanson
#2327
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robin Dale Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point , and has conducted research on signalling.
Go to Profile#719
Charles Plosser
#19600
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Charles Irving Plosser is a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who served from August 1, 2006, to March 1, 2015. An academic macroeconomist, he is well known for his work on real business cycles, a term which he and John B. Long, Jr. coined. Specifically, he wrote along with Charles R. Nelson in 1982 an influential work entitled "Trends and Random Walks in Macroeconomic Time Series" in which they dealt with the hypothesis of permanent shocks affecting the aggregate product .
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Gardner Ackley
#18824
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Hugh Gardner Ackley was an American economist and diplomat. Ackley served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President John F. Kennedy, and as the chairman under President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1964 to 1968. He also served as ambassador to Italy from 1968 to 1969. Ackley was a member of the University of Michigan faculty for 43 years and served as chair of its economics department. Upon returning to the university following his ambassadorship, he was named the Henry Carter Adams Professor of Political Economy. In 1982 he served as president of the American Economic Associa...
Go to Profile#721
Nicholas Kaldor
#41323
Overall Influence
#722
Gary Yohe
#15869
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Gary Wynn Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He holds a PhD from Yale University. Yohe specializes in Microeconomic theory, Natural Resources, and Environmental Economics. He is a researcher on the economics of climate change and integrated assessment modelling. Among other works, he is an editor of the book "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" and co-author of "Microeconomics| Microeconomics: Theory and Applications". He is a senior member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
Go to Profile#723
Jennifer Doleac
#11997
Overall Influence
Jennifer Doleac is an American economist and is the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. She was previously an associate professor at Texas A&M, where she directed the Justice Tech Lab, was a research affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and is on the board of editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. She also hosts the Probable Causation podcast. In October 2022, Vox named her to their "Future Perfect 50," a list of "scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists building a more perfect future," writing, "Doleac looks at criminal justice policy thro...
Go to Profile#724
Heiner Flassbeck
#15098
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Heiner Flassbeck is a German economist and public intellectual. From 1998 to 1999 he was a State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Finance where he also advised former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine on a reform of the European Monetary System. He became the Chief of Macroeconomics and Development of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva in January 2003, a position that he held until resigning at the end of 2012 due to his age.
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Takatoshi Ito
#16338
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Takatoshi Ito is a Japanese economist. He is a professor of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and a senior professor of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
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Magnus Henrekson
#19173
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Magnus Henrekson, born 1958, is a professor of economics and between 2005 and 2020 he was president of the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2009 he was Jacob Wallenberg Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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Padma Desai
#15024
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Padma Desai was an Indian-American development economist who was the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor Emerita of comparative economic systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. Known for her scholarship on Soviet and Indian industrial policy, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009.
Go to Profile#728
Shouyong Shi
#22585
Overall Influence
Shouyong Shi is a Canadian economist and member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty. He is a tier 1 Canada Research Chair as well as a Research Fellow at the Bank of Canada. Shi's research focuses on topics in macroeconomics and labour economics. He is co-editor of the economics journal Annals of Economics and Finance.
Go to Profile#729
Philip R. Lane
#22360
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Philip Richard Lane is an Irish economist who has been serving as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2019 and concurrently as ECB chief economist. He previously served as Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland from 2015 to 2019. As ECB Chief Economist, Lane is seen by many as providing an academic counterweight to the traditional political abilities of ECB President, Christine Lagarde.
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Charles F. Manski
#21892
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Charles Frederick Manski is an American economist and university professor at the Northwestern University. Manski is a noted econometrician, known for his work in rational choice theory and an innovator in the area of parameter identification. His research spans econometrics, judgment and decision, and the analysis of social policy . A specialist in prediction and decision, he is known within the economics field for landmark work on partial identification, identification of discrete choice models, and identification of social interactions. He has also performed substantial empirical research ...
Go to Profile#731
Süreyya Serdengeçti
#9618
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Süreyya Serdengeçti is a Turkish economist and former Governor of the Central Bank of Turkey. He is currently working as a lecturer in Economics at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey.
Go to Profile#732
Daniel Bromley
#24710
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Daniel W. Bromley is an economist, the former Anderson-Bascom Professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and since 2009, Emeritus Professor. His research in institutional economics explains the foundations of property rights, natural resources and the environment; and economic development. He has been editor of the journal Land Economics since 1974.
Go to Profile#733
Ronald W. Jones
#28106
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Ronald Winthrop Jones was an influential international trade economist and retired Xerox Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. His highly acclaimed book Globalization and the Theory of Input Trade summarizes much of his past work and also discusses the recent market trend toward fragmentation and outsourcing of the production process.
Go to Profile#734
Graham Loomes
#16645
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Graham Loomes, is a British economist and academic, specialising in behavioural economics. Since 2009, he has been Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick. He previously worked at the University of Newcastle, the University of York and the University of East Anglia.
Go to Profile#735
Emily Oster
#12245
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist and author. She is currently the JJE Goldman Sachs University Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where she has taught since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research has received exposure among non-economists through The Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Go to Profile#736
Andrea Repetto
#13617
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Andrea Isabel Repetto Lisboa is a Chilean economist. She currently has a teaching position at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago. She holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and an undergraduate degree in commercial engineering from the same university.
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Pierangelo Garegnani
#17682
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Pierangelo Garegnani was an Italian economist and professor of the University of Rome III. He was the director of the Fondazione Centro Piero Sraffa di Studi e Documenti at the Federico Caffè School of Economics, and also the literary executor of the works, documents and papers left by the Italian economist Piero Sraffa to the University of Cambridge's Wren Library.
Go to Profile#738
Charles Goodhart
#14571
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Charles Albert Eric Goodhart, is a British economist. His career can be divided into two sections: his term with the Bank of England and its associated public policy; and his academic work with the London School of Economics. Charles Goodhart's work focuses on central bank governance practices and monetary frameworks. He also conducted academic research into foreign exchange markets. He is best known for formulating Goodhart's Law, which states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Go to Profile#739
John Muellbauer
#24675
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Norbert Joseph Muellbauer, FBA is a British applied economist who is a professor at the University of Oxford. He holds several positions at Oxford University including an Official Fellowship at Nuffield College and a professorship and senior fellowship at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He also is a fellow not only of the British Academy, but also of the Econometric Society, the Centre for Economic Policy Research and of the European Economic Association .
Go to Profile#740
Kevin Hoover
#21752
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kevin Douglas Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Duke University. He has previously held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, University of Oxford , and the University of California, Davis, where he served eight years as chair of the Economics Department. Hoover is most noted for his work in the philosophy and methodology of economics with issues surrounding the modelling of causation. He has been the president of the History of Economics Society and chaired the International Network for Economic Method. He is the editor of the journal History of Political ...
Go to Profile#741
Alan T. Peacock
#12129
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Sir Alan Turner Peacock DSC, FBA, FRSE was a British economist. Early life Alan Turner Peacock was born in County Durham in 1922. He was the son of the scientist Alexander David Peacock, who in 1926 became Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee . On his father's appointment, the family moved to Broughty Ferry. He was educated at Grove Academy, the High School of Dundee and the University of St Andrews, where he completed a war-shortened degree in economics and history.
Go to Profile#742
Eric von Hippel
#3959
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.
Go to Profile#743
Paul A. David
#19880
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
Paul Allan David was an American academic economist, noted for his work on the economics of scientific progress and technical change. He was also well-known for his work in American economic history and in demographic economics.
Go to Profile#744
Fumio Hayashi
#18968
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese economist. He is a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. Hayashi received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1980. He has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Tokyo, the University of Tsukuba, Osaka University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Hitotsubashi University.
Go to Profile#745
José María Gay de Liébana
#22656
Overall Influence
1953 - 2021 (68 years)
José María Gay de Liébana y Saludas was a Spanish economist, lawyer, and university professor, popular as an economic commentator on several television programs. Biography and career Gay de Liébana was born in Barcelona on 6 May 1953. He earned a doctorate in economics and social sciences from the Abat Oliba CEU University, and a degree in law from the Universidad Camilo José Cela in Madrid.
Go to Profile#746
Kurt Mandelbaum
#26798
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Kurt Mandelbaum was a German-British economist well known for his pioneering contribution in the field of the economics of development. Kurt Mandelbaum was one of a group of emigre economists from Central Europe who played a large role in founding the discipline of development economics in the UK, during and shortly after World War II. In general these economists doubted the usefulness of neoclassical economics with its presumptions of smoothly operating markets and saw the role of the state as being key to the development process. The industrialization debates in the USSR in the 1920s were their starting point.
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Lars E. O. Svensson
#23848
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lars Erik Oscar Svensson, is a Swedish economist. He was on the faculty of Princeton University 2001–2009. Since June 2014, he is Affiliated Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Since 2009 he is Affiliated Professor at Stockholm University. He has published significant research in macroeconomics, especially monetary economics, international trade and general equilibrium theory. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a well-known proponent of price path targeting, a topic on which he published significant research.
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Terry Barker
#26341
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Terry Barker is a British economist and former Director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research part of the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the Tyndall Centre, the Chairman of Cambridge Econometrics , and chairman of the Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, which is a charitable organisation with a mission to promote new approaches to solving economic problems.
Go to Profile#749
Thomas W. Gilligan
#5355
Overall Influence
Thomas W. Gilligan is an American economist who was the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 2015 to 2020. Prior to taking over as head of the Stanford-based think tank, he served as dean of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Gilligan previously held a variety of positions at the University of Southern California from 1987 until 2008.
Go to Profile#750
Marina von Neumann Whitman
#7609
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Marina von Neumann Whitman is an American economist, writer and former automobile executive. She is a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business as well as The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
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