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,
#801
Jörg Baten
#5454
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jörg Baten is a German economic historian. He is the former President of the European Historical Economics Society, current co-Editor-in-chief of Economics and Human Biology and is currently a professor of economic history at the University of Tübingen.
Go to Profile#802
Randall Kroszner
#12803
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Randall S. Kroszner is an American economist who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2009. Kroszner chaired Fed's board Committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutions during the global financial crisis. He has been professor of economics at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, with various leaves, and named Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2009, and serves as a senior advisor for Patomak Partners.
Go to Profile#803
Francine D. Blau
#30795
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Francine Dee Blau is an American economist and professor of economics as well as Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. In 2010, Blau was the first woman to receive the IZA Prize in Labor Economics for her "seminal contributions to the economic analysis of labor market inequality." She was awarded the 2017 Jacob Mincer Award by the Society of Labor Economists in recognition of lifetime of contributions to the field of labor economics.
Go to Profile#804
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis
#19598
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis is a Chilean economist. He is Professor of the Department of Economics and the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales at the University of Chile. Along with a few other Chilean students, Ffrench-Davis got the chance to study at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1971. Although the students were later named Chicago Boys, Professor Ffrench-Davis was a critic of the neo-liberal policies implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship.
Go to Profile#805
G. S. Maddala
#23463
Overall Influence
1933 - 1999 (66 years)
Gangadharrao Soundalyarao "G. S." Maddala was an Indian American economist, mathematician, and teacher, known for his contributions in the field of econometrics and for the textbooks he authored in this field.
Go to Profile#806
Kenneth Binmore
#9256
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Kenneth George "Ken" Binmore, is an English mathematician, economist, and game theorist, a Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College London and a Visiting Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. As a founder of modern economic theory of bargaining , he made important contributions to the foundations of game theory, experimental economics, evolutionary game theory and analytical philosophy. He took up economics after holding the Chair of Mathematics at the London School of Economics. The switch has put him at the forefront of developments in game theory. His other interests include political and moral philosophy, decision theory, and statistics.
Go to Profile#807
Suresh Tendulkar
#11753
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
Suresh D. Tendulkar was an Indian economist and former chief of the National Statistical Commission. Tendulkar was a member of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Economic Advisory Council from 2004 to 2008 and then served as its chairman from 2008 to 2009 when C. Rangarajan vacated the post to enter the Rajya Sabha. He died on 21 June 2011, as a result of cardiac arrest at Prayag Hospital, Pune .
Go to Profile#808
Dominick Salvatore
#35320
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dominick Salvatore is an American economist, currently Distinguished Professor at Fordham University, an Honorary Professor at Shanghai Finance University, Hunan University, and University of Pretoria, Director of the Global Economic Policy Center and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and New York Academy of Sciences. He is the author of "International Economics".
Go to Profile#809
Tatyana Zaslavskaya
#5563
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya was a Russian economic sociologist and a theoretician of perestroika. She was the prime author of the Novosibirsk Report and several books on the economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside. She was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992 and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zaslavskaya was the founder of RPORC and also its director in the years from 1987 to 1992. In 2000 she was the Laureate of the Demidov Prize and the honorary president of the Levada Center.
Go to Profile#810
Adrian Pagan
#24338
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Adrian Rodney Pagan is an Australian economist and Professor of Economics in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. From 1995 to 2000, he was a member of the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Go to Profile#811
Christina Paxson
#7930
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christina Hull Paxson is an American economist and public health expert serving as the 19th president of Brown University. Previously, she was the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics & Public Affairs at Princeton University as well as the dean of Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Go to Profile#812
Greg Kaplan
#39865
Overall Influence
Greg Kaplan is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His research encompasses macroeconomics, labor economics and applied microeconomics, with a focus on distributional issues. Education and Career Greg Kaplan graduated with a BCom from Macquarie University in 2000. He went on to further study at the London School of Economics and received an MSc in economics in 2002. He got a PhD from New York University in 2009. Following his graduation with a PhD from New York University in 2009, worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for a year. He then became assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#813
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
#16751
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Douglas James "Doug" Holtz-Eakin is an American economist. He was formerly an economics professor at Syracuse University, director of the Congressional Budget Office, and chief economic policy adviser to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. Holtz-Eakin is currently president of the American Action Forum policy institute, a conservative think tank.
Go to Profile#814
Harvey Leibenstein
#25167
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Harvey Leibenstein was a Ukrainian-born American economist. One of his most important contributions to economics was the concept of X-inefficiency and the critical minimum effort thesis in development economics.
Go to Profile#815
Ricardo Hausmann
#11203
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ricardo Hausmann is the former Director of the Center for International Development currently leading the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab and is a Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a former Venezuelan Minister of Planning and former Head of the . He co-introduced several regularly used concepts in economics including original sin, growth diagnostics, self-discovery, dark matter, the product space, and economic complexity.
Go to Profile#816
Richard Werner
#16559
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Richard Andreas Werner is a German banking and development economist who is a university professor at University of Winchester. He has proposed the "Quantity Theory of Credit", or "Quantity Theory of Disaggregated Credit", which disaggregates credit creation that are used for the real economy , on the one hand, and financial transactions, on the other hand. In 1995, he proposed a new monetary policy to swiftly deal with banking crises, which he called 'Quantitative Easing', and it was published in the Nikkei. He also first used the expression "QE2" in public to refer to the need to implement 'true quantitative easing' as an expansion in credit creation.
Go to Profile#817
Nicholas Barberis
#14742
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Nicholas C. Barberis is the Stephen & Camille Schramm Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management. Professor Barberis' research focuses on behavioral finance and in particular, on applications of cognitive psychology to understanding the pricing of financial assets.
Go to Profile#818
Claudia Sahm
#25723
Overall Influence
Claudia Rae Sahm is an American economist, leading the Macroeconomic Research initiative of the Jain Family Institute. She was formerly director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a Section Chief at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where she worked in various capacities from 2007 to 2019. Sahm specializes in macroeconomics and household finance. She is best known for the development of the Sahm Rule, a Federal Reserve Economic Data indicator for identifying recessions in real-time.
Go to Profile#819
Clark Kerr
#554
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Clark Kerr was an American economist and academic administrator. He was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and twelfth president of the University of California. Early life and education Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, to Samuel William and Caroline Kerr. He was raised on rural farms outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, first in the Stony Creek area and then in the Oley Valley after age 10. Even after Kerr became one of the most prominent academic administrators of his generation, he always regarded himself as a "Pennsylvania farm boy" and expressed fru...
Go to Profile#820
Samuel Hollander
#27556
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Samuel Hollander, is a British/Canadian/Israeli economist. Born in London, he received a B.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1959. In 1961 he received an AM and a Ph.D. in 1963 from Princeton University. He started with the University of Toronto becoming an Assistant Professor , Associate Professor , Professor , University Professor , and upon his retirement in 1998, University Professor Emeritus. Since 2000 he has been a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He became a citizen of Canada in 1967 and of Israel in 2000.
Go to Profile#821
Heather Boushey
#22153
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Heather Marie Boushey is an American economist. Boushey currently serves as a member of President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers. She also serves as the Chief Economist for the Invest in America Cabinet at the White House. She previously was the president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She has also worked as an economist at the Center for American Progress and the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee.
Go to Profile#822
Zvi Hercowitz
#32559
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Zvi Hercowitz is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University's School of Economics and has been a member of the montetary committee of the Bank of Israel since 2017. He emigrated to Israel in 1969 and began his academic career at Tel Aviv University in 1980. He published extensively throughout his career, with notable works includingMoney and the Dispersion of Relative Prices", Journal of Political Economy, April 1981; "Output Growth, the Real Wage, and Employment Fluctuations" with Michael Sampson, American Economic Review, December 1991; and "Long-Run Implications of Investment-Specific Tech...
Go to Profile#823
Nicholas C. Yannelis
#27738
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nicholas C. Yannelis is the Henry B. Tippie Research Professor of Economics and Applied Mathematics and Computation at the University of Iowa. He is an emeritus Commerce Distinguished Alumni Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also he was the Sir Johns Hicks Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester. His research includes the study of equilibrium concepts in games and economies with asymmetric information; equilibrium in infinite dimensional commodity spaces; equilibrium in games and economies with discontinuous preferences; and equilibrium theory and implementation under ambiguity.
Go to Profile#824
Richard W. Rahn
#9180
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard W. Rahn is an American economist, syndicated columnist, and entrepreneur. He is chairman of Improbable Success Productions and the Institute for Global Economic Growth. Rahn writes a syndicated weekly economic column which is published in The Washington Times, Real Clear Markets and elsewhere. He was the vice president and chief economist of the United States Chamber of Commerce during the Reagan administration and remains a staunch advocate of supply-side economics, small government, and classical liberalism.
Go to Profile#825
David N. Weil
#33089
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
David Nathan Weil is the James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics at Brown University. Weil's scholarship has focused on economic growth and demographic economics. Between 2015 and 2018, Weil chaired Brown's Department of Economics.
Go to Profile#826
Lars Feld
#14934
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Lars Peter Feld is a German economist who currently serves as director of the Walter Eucken Institut and as Professor for Economic Policy at the University of Freiburg. From 2020 to 2021 he also chaired the German Council of Economic Experts. Federal Minister of Finance Christian Lindner made Feld his personal economic policy advisor in February 2022.
Go to Profile#827
Peter R. Orszag
#7701
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Peter Richard Orszag is the Chief Executive Officer of Lazard. Orszag was announced as Lazard’s incoming CEO on May 26, 2023. He assumed the role on October 1, 2023, at which time he also became a Board Director.
Go to Profile#828
Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
#30264
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Kathleen Marie Eisenhardt is the Stanford W. Ascherman, M.D. Professor and co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University. She is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, having been elected in 2016. In 2012 she was the recipient of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.
Go to Profile#829
Enrico Giovannini
#9648
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Enrico Giovannini is an Italian economist, statistician and academic, member of the Club of Rome. Since February 2021, he has been serving as Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility in the Draghi Government. From April 2013 to February 2014, he served as Minister of Labour and Social Policies in the Letta Government. From 2009 to 2013, he held the office of President of the Italian National Institute of Statistics .
Go to Profile#830
Martin Neil Baily
#35091
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Martin Neil Baily is an economist at the Brookings Institution and formerly at the Peterson Institute. He is best known for his work on productivity and competitiveness and for his tenure as a cabinet member during the Clinton Administration. He was one of three members of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1994 to 1996, and chairman of the Council from 1999 to 2001. He currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center's Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative and serves as a senior advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Go to Profile#831
Jan Hatzius
#30591
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jan Hatzius is the chief economist of investment bank Goldman Sachs. Notable for his bearish forecasts prior to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, he is a two-time winner of the Lawrence R. Klein Award for the most accurate US economic forecast over the prior four years. He has also won a number of other forecasting awards, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Institutional Investor annual forecaster rankings.
Go to Profile#832
Morton O. Schapiro
#8219
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Morton Owen Schapiro is an American economist who served as the 16th president of Northwestern University from 2009 to 2022. Schapiro previously served as president of Williams College in Massachusetts from 2000 to 2009, vice president for planning of the University of Southern California from 1998 to 2000, and dean of the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from 1994 to 2000.
Go to Profile#834
Wu Jinglian
#10173
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Wu Jinglian is one of the preeminent economists of the People's Republic of China , primarily specializing in economic policy as it applies to China's ongoing series of economic reforms. Renowned for his resolute conviction that socialism is compatible with a market system, he is affectionately referred to in the media as Wu Shichang .
Go to Profile#835
Victor Fuchs
#19584
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Victor Robert Fuchs was an American health economist. He was known for his 1975 book Who Shall Live?, which detailed the consequences of rising health care costs in the United States. Early life and education Fuchs was born in the Bronx. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Austria. His younger brother, Lawrence Fuchs, went on to be a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
Go to Profile#836
Pol Antràs
#29683
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Pol Antràs Puchal is a Spanish economist. He is Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2003. He received his BA and MSc in economics in 1998 and 1999, respectively, from Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona and his PhD in economics from MIT in 2003. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research , where he served as director of the International Trade and Organization Working Group. He is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and is a member of CESifo’s Research Network. Since 2015, he has ser...
Go to Profile#837
Paul Streeten
#12382
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Paul Patrick Streeten was an Austrian-born British economics professor. He was a professor at Boston University, US until his retirement. He has been a distinguished academic working on development economics since the 1950s.
Go to Profile#838
Philip M. Parker
#10140
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Philip M. Parker is an American economist and academic, currently the INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and Internet searches. He claims that his programs have written more than 200,000 books.
Go to Profile#839
Tim Leunig
#17258
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Timothy Charles Leunig is an economist at the London School of Economics's Department of Economic History. After a long career as a Special Advisor, he became a Director at the economic consultants Public First.
Go to Profile#840
Andy Haldane
#8731
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Andrew George Haldane is a British economist who worked at the Bank of England between 1989 and 2021 as the chief economist and executive director of monetary analysis and statistics. He resigned from the Bank of England in June 2021 to become chief executive of the Royal Society for Arts. He sits on the UK's government's Economic Advisory Council.
Go to Profile#841
John Harry Dunning
#8491
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
John Harry Dunning was a British economist and is widely recognised as the father of the field of international business. He researched the economics of international direct investment and the multinational enterprise from the 1950s until his death. In the 1980s, he published the eclectic paradigm or OLI-Model/Framework as further development on Internalization theory. OLI remains the predominant theoretical perspective to study international business activities, notably foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises. His first book, American Investment in British Manufacturing Indu...
Go to Profile#842
Yuliy Sannikov
#22384
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Yuliy Sannikov is a Ukrainian economist known for his contributions to mathematical economics, game theory, and corporate finance. He is an economics professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and won both the 2015 Fischer Black Prize and 2016 John Bates Clark Medal.
Go to Profile#843
Luis Garicano
#13953
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Luis Garicano Gabilondo is a Spanish economist and politician who was a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2022. He was also vice president of Renew Europe and vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe . Before entering politics, he was a professor of strategy and economics at IE Business School in Madrid and at the London School of Economics . After leaving the European Parliament he has returned to academia as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. An overview...
Go to Profile#844
Montek Singh Ahluwalia
#5921
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an Indian economist and civil servant who was the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of India, a position which carried the rank of a Cabinet Minister. He tendered his resignation for this post in May 2014 following the impending end of the UPA II regime at the center. He was previously the first Director of the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund.
Go to Profile#845
Yann Algan
#24270
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Yann Algan is a French economist, Associate Dean of Pre-experience Programs and Professor of Economics at HEC Paris. He was previously and until 2021 a Professor of Economics of Sciences Po, where he was dean of the School of Public Affairs. His research interests include the digital economy, social capital and well-being. In 2009, Yann Algan was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economics in France.
Go to Profile#846
Matthew Kahn
#15272
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Matthew E. Kahn is a leading American educator in the field of environmental economics. He is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. Between 2019 and 2021, he served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business, with appointments at both Carey Business School and Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#847
Diane Elson
#11198
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Diane Rosemary Elson is a British economist, sociologist and gender and development social scientist. She is Professor Emerita of sociology at the University of Essex and a former professor of development studies at the University of Manchester.
Go to Profile#848
Robert D. Atkinson
#13180
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert David Atkinson is a Canadian-American economist. He is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation , a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., that promotes policies based on innovation economics. He was previously Vice President of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Go to Profile#849
John W. Pratt
#16518
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
John Winsor Pratt is Emeritus William Ziegler professor business administration at Harvard University. His former education was conducted at Princeton University and Stanford University, where he specialized in mathematics and statistics. Pratt spent most of his academic career at Harvard University. He was an editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 1965 to 1970. His researches on risk aversion, risk sharing incentives, and the nature and discovery of stochastic laws, statistical relationships that describe the effects of decisions. He has made contributions to rese...
Go to Profile#850
Richard Layard, Baron Layard
#9300
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA is a British labour economist, currently working as programme director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Layard was Senior Research Officer for the Robbins Committee on Higher Education. His work on mental health, including publishing The Depression Report in 2006, led to the establishment of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme in England. He is co-editor of the World Happiness Report, with John F. Helliwell and Jeffrey Sachs.
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