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,
#851
Claude Ménard
#29139
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Claude Ménard is a Canadian economist and professor at the University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne. Ménard is also the creator and former director of the Centre d'analyse théorique des organisations et des marchés , which merged with the Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne in 2009, as well as a co-founder of the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics . His research focuses on institutional and organizational economics.
Go to Profile#852
Jean Pisani-Ferry
#16098
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jean Pisani-Ferry is a French economist and public policy expert. He is a fellow at think tanks Bruegel in Brussels and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. He is also a senior professor in economics and public management at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, and a professor at the European University Institute near Florence.
Go to Profile#853
Victor Polterovich
#40253
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Victor Meerovich Polterovich is a Russian economist. He was one of the leading figures in mathematical economics in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, and made several important contributions to general equilibrium theory.
Go to Profile#854
Frances Stewart
#15619
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Frances Julia Stewart is professor emeritus of development economics and director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity , University of Oxford. A pre-eminent development economist, she was named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American. She was president of the Human Development and Capability Association from 2008 to 2010.
Go to Profile#855
Wendy Carlin
#24205
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Wendy Joan Carlin, is a professor of economics at University College London, expert advisor to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, and the economics of transition.
Go to Profile#856
T. N. Srinivasan
#21401
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
T. N. Srinivasan, in full Thirukodikaval Nilakanta Srinivasan , was an Indian economist who had taught and worked in the United States. He was the Emeritus Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University. He was formerly chairman of the department of economics. He was a special adviser to the Development Research Center at the World Bank from 1977 to 1980, and taught at numerous academic institutions for over four decades, including MIT, Stanford University, and the Indian Statistical Institute. In 2007, he received a Padma Bhushan decoration from the President of India for his...
Go to Profile#857
Walt Whitman Rostow
#47848
Overall Influence
#858
Darrell Duffie
#10321
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Darrell Duffie is a Canadian financial economist and is Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the author of numerous research articles, and several books, including Futures Markets, Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory, and—with Kenneth Singleton—Credit Risk.
Go to Profile#859
Henry Farber
#39356
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Henry Stuart Farber is an American economist and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University. His research revolves around different topics related to labor economics, econometrics, law and economics, and industrial relations.
Go to Profile#860
Piet Rietveld
#21391
Overall Influence
1952 - 2013 (61 years)
Pieter Rietveld was a Dutch economist and Professor in Transport Economics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and a fellow at the Tinbergen Institute. He was among the top researchers in economic geography according to IDEAS/RePEc.
Go to Profile#861
Arthur De Vany
#23685
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Arthur S. De Vany is an American economist who has studied the Hollywood film industry and developed theories of evolutionary fitness focusing on nutrition and exercise in the paleo manner. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#862
John Habakkuk
#16435
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Sir Hrothgar John Habakkuk was a British economic historian. Biography Habakkuk was born in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, the son of Evan and Anne Habakkuk. He was named "Hrothgar" after Hroðgar in Beowulf, which his father was reading at the time of his birth. However, he came to be known as John when he started to travel to the United States, and when he was knighted he found it easier to call himself "Sir John" than "Sir Hrothgar". His surname was assumed by a seventeenth-century forebear after the prophet Habakkuk, it being a Welsh custom at that time to take patronymics from the Bible...
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James Brander
#31739
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
James Alan Brander is a Canadian economist and a professor of Asia-Pacific International Trade, University of British Columbia. He is known as co-author of a seminal 1986 article in The American Economic Review, with Tracy R. Lewis, on "Oligopoly and Financial Structure: The Limited Liability Effect", as well as his work in international trade with Barbara Spencer, particularly the Brander–Spencer model, in which a government can enhance national welfare by subsidizing domestic firms to aid in their competition against foreign markets
Go to Profile#864
Lael Brainard
#8221
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lael Brainard is an American economist serving as the 14th director of the National Economic Council since February 21, 2023. She previously served as the 22nd vice chair of the Federal Reserve between May 2022 and February 2023. Prior to her term as vice chair, Brainard served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, taking office in 2014. Before her appointment to the Federal Reserve, she served as the under secretary of the treasury for international affairs from 2010 to 2013.
Go to Profile#865
Bert Rürup
#14404
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Hans-Adalbert Rürup is a German economist and former chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts. He was formerly a professor of economics at the Darmstadt University of Technology. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of the International School of Management in Dortmund. In 2013 he changed into the ISM's board of trustees and took up a position as the president of the newly founded Handelsblatt Research Institute .
Go to Profile#866
Alan M. Taylor
#26908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alan M. Taylor is the C. Bryan Cameron Chair in International Economics and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of California, Davis. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. In February 2023, Columbia University announced that Taylor will join its faculty as a full professor in January 2024.
Go to Profile#867
Mark P. Taylor
#11179
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mark P. Taylor is the Donald Danforth, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Finance at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he was Dean of Olin Business School after holding the same role at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick. Before that, a managing director of BlackRock.
Go to Profile#868
Warwick McKibbin
#13474
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Warwick James McKibbin is an Australian Professor of Economics at the Australian National University who works across a wide range of areas in applied policy. He has published more than 200 scholarly articles and several books and is internationally known for his contribution to global economic modelling.
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Michael J. Piore
#23651
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Joseph Piore is an American economist and professor of economics and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research centers on labor economics, immigration, and innovation. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984.
Go to Profile#870
Stefan Voigt
#14036
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stefan Voigt is a German economist and one of the Directors of the University of Hamburg's Institute of Law and Economics. He is also a Fellow of CESifo in Munich. Previous positions include chairs at the Philipps-University Marburg, the University of Kassel, the Ruhr University Bochum, a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a senior fellowship at the Krupp Kolleg in Greifswald and a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena.
Go to Profile#871
Teck-Hua Ho
#15572
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Teck-Hua Ho is the fifth president of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore . He is also a Distinguished University Professor at NTU Singapore. Prior to joining NTU, he was the senior deputy president and provost at the National University of Singapore , and the William Halford Jr. Family Professor of Marketing at the Haas School of Business . He is also the founding executive chairman of AI Singapore, a national research and development programme.
Go to Profile#872
Anthony Shorrocks
#13793
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Anthony F. Shorrocks is a British development economist. Academic career Between January 2001 and April 2009 he was Director of UNU-WIDER. Prior to that he was Professor at the London School of Economics and before that he worked at the University of Essex. He has also had several visiting appointments in the US, Canada, Italy, and Russia.
Go to Profile#873
Gunnar Heinsohn
#12891
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Gunnar Heinsohn was a German author, sociologist and economist and professor emeritus at the University of Bremen where he had a chair in social pedagogy from 1984. Heinsohn published on a wide array of topics, starting from economics, demography and its relationship with security policy and genocide, and revisionist chronology theories in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky.
Go to Profile#874
Lans Bovenberg
#23330
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Arij Lans Bovenberg is a Dutch economist, and Professor of Economics at the Tilburg University and Erasmus University, known mainly due to his contribution to the Dutch debate on population ageing, pension reforms and public finances. Lans Bovenberg was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2003.
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Werner Hildenbrand
#17867
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Werner Hildenbrand is a German economist and mathematician. He was educated at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his Diplom in mathematics, applied mathematics and physics in 1961. He continued his education at the University of Heidelberg and received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 and his habilitation in economics and mathematics in 1968.
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Mark Weisbrot
#8108
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mark Alan Weisbrot is an American economist and columnist. He is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.
Go to Profile#877
Ricardo J. Caballero
#21542
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ricardo Jorge Caballero is a Chilean macroeconomist who is the Ford International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also served as the Chairman of MIT's Economic Department from 2008 to 2011. He is a director of the World Economic Laboratory at MIT and an NBER Research Associate. Caballero received his PhD from MIT in 1988, and he taught at Columbia University before returning to the MIT faculty.
Go to Profile#878
Larry J. Sechrest
#27251
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Larry James Sechrest was an American economist who advocated the ideas of the Austrian School. He was a professor of economics at Sul Ross State University and was director of the university's Free Enterprise Institute.
Go to Profile#879
Christopher Bliss
#40331
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Christopher John Emile Bliss, FBA is a British economist who was the Nuffield Professor of International Economics at the University of Oxford between 1992 and 2007. Born in 1940, Bliss was educated at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1962 and then completing a PhD there in 1966. He was elected to a fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1965, the same year he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Cambridge. Promoted to a full lectureship in 1967, he moved to the University of Essex in 1971 to be Professor of Economics, before moving again in 1977, this ...
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Ross Levine
#22602
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ross Levine is an American economist who currently holds the Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an advisor to the World Economic Forum. As of 2018, he is the 12th most cited economist in the world.
Go to Profile#881
Sanjaya Lall
#17497
Overall Influence
1940 - 2005 (65 years)
Sanjaya Lall was a development economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. Lall's research interests included the impact of foreign direct investment in developing countries, the economics of multi-national corporations, and the development of technological capability and industrial competitiveness in developing countries. One of the world's pre-eminent development economists, Lall was also one of the founding editors of the journal Oxford Development Studies and a senior economist at the World Bank .
Go to Profile#882
Agnar Sandmo
#35461
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Agnar Sandmo was a Norwegian economist at the Norwegian School of Economics . He made a series of important contributions in the study of disparities, redistribution, insurance arrangements and tax systems.
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Gary Gorton
#12026
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gary Bernard Gorton is an American economist who currently serves as the Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management. He is known for his theory on the role of repurchase agreements on the 2008 financial crisis.
Go to Profile#884
Stephen Salant
#27456
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stephen W. Salant is an economist who has done extensive research in applied microeconomics . His 1975 model of speculative attacks in the gold market was adapted by Paul Krugman and others to explain speculative attacks in foreign exchange markets. Hundreds of journal articles and books on financial speculative attacks followed.
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Jesse Rothstein
#11970
Overall Influence
Jesse Rothstein is an economist, and currently professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was chief economist at the US Department of Labor. He is the founding director of the California Policy Lab, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a member of the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Review, and Industrial Relations.
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Victor Halberstadt
#14565
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Victor Halberstadt is a Dutch economist. Biography Halberstadt was born on 16 June, 1939, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was raised in a Jewish family and experienced the terrors of the Holocaust. From 1965 to 1974, Halberstadt was a senior lecturer of public sector finance at the University of Amsterdam. From 1971 to 1973, he was an adviser of the Directorate-General of the National Budget of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. On 9 September 1974, he was appointed professor of public sector finance of the University of Leiden. In October 1981, he was along with economist Cees de Galan appointed a...
Go to Profile#887
Masaru Kaneko
#32313
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Masaru Kaneko is a Japanese Marxian economist specializing in Institutional economics, public finance and local government finance. He is best known for appearance in TV shows such as Sunday Morning or Asamade nama terebi and authoring several books and newspaper articles. Since 2000, he has been a professor at Keio University.
Go to Profile#888
Yair Tauman
#14050
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Yair Tauman is a Professor of Economics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and the Director of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics and M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics, the latter two under the supervision of Robert Aumann. His areas of research interests are game theory and industrial organization. He has published, among others, in Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, Quarterly Journal of Economics and RAND Journal of Economics.
Go to Profile#889
Kari Polanyi Levitt
#15163
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Kari Polanyi Levitt is a Canadian economist, currently Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal. She is known for her work on economic development and economic sovereignty, and in particular for her 1970 book Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada. She is also the literary executor of her father, the economic historian Karl Polanyi.
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Sigbert Prais
#39105
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Sigbert Jon Prais, FBA was an economist and had been the senior research fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research since 1970. Life On 19 December 1928, Sigbert Jon Prais was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; he was the oldest of four children to orthodox Jewish parents. His family arrived in Britain in 1934 as Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression in Germany. Prais' father established a manufacturing company that made metal frames and ornaments for women's handbags, in Birmingham. Prais was sent to school in London and later continued his studies at the King Edward's School, Birmingham.
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John C. Hull
#6693
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John C. Hull is a professor of Derivatives and Risk Management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a respected researcher in the academic field of quantitative finance and is the author of two books on financial derivatives that are widely used texts for market practitioners: "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" and "Fundamentals of Futures and Options Markets". He has also written "Risk Management and Financial Institutions" and "Machine Learning in Business: An Introduction to the World of Data Science"
Go to Profile#892
Henry J. Aaron
#20163
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Henry Jacob Aaron is an American policy analyst and economist. He is the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, where he has been employed since 1968. He served as director of the program from 1990 through 1996.
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Matthew O. Jackson
#15947
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Matthew Owen Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of CIFAR. Jackson's research concerns game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks. Jackson was one of the founders of the study of networks in economics. His work has analyzed the formation of networks and the sources and effects of homophily in social relationships. He has also made important contributions to the study of how networks mediate access to jobs and information as well as the contagion ...
Go to Profile#894
Heinz D. Kurz
#37903
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Heinz D. Kurz is professor of economics at the University of Graz. Selected publications with Neri Salvadori as editor: The Elgar Companion to David Ricardo. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, England 2015, .Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens, Beck, München 2013, .with Richard Sturn: Die größten Ökonomen. Adam Smith. UTB, Stuttgart 2012, .with Richard Sturn: Schumpeter für jedermann. Von der Rastlosigkeit des Kapitalismus. Frankfurter Allgemeine Buchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 2012, .as editor: Klassiker des ökonomischen Denkens. Band 1, Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2008, und Band 2, München 2009, .as editor: David Ricardo: Über die Grundsätze der politischen Ökonomie und der Besteuerung.
Go to Profile#895
Silvana Tenreyro
#24382
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
María Silvana Tenreyro is a British-Argentine economist who is professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and an external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee since July 2017. She served as the president of the European Economic Association for 2021.
Go to Profile#896
Barry Chiswick
#31583
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Barry Raymond Chiswick, born in 1942, is an American economist and professor of economics at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University. He has done extensive research on labor economics, human resources and income distribution. His "fundamental contributions to the economic analysis of migration" were rewarded with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2011, with George J. Borjas as co-recipient.
Go to Profile#897
John Vickers
#13277
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sir John Stuart Vickers is a British economist and the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Education Vickers studied at Aylesbury Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated with a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#898
John Shoven
#18292
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John B. Shoven is the former Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University, the Buzz and Barbara McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He specializes in public finance and corporate finance and has published on social security, corporate and personal taxation, mutual funds, pension plans and applied general equilibrium economics.
Go to Profile#899
Jess Benhabib
#39421
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jess Benhabib is a professor at New York University, and known for his contributions to growth theory and sunspot equilibria. Benhabib earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976. He started his teaching career as an assistant professor at University of Southern California. In 1980, he became an associate professor at New York University and remained there ever since. Between 1984 and 1987 he served as Chairman of the Economics Department at NYU.
Go to Profile#900
Ronald McKinnon
#22933
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Ronald Ian McKinnon was an applied economist. His primary interests were international economics and economic development, with strong secondary interests in transitional economies and fiscal federalism. Understanding financial institutions in general, and monetary institutions in particular, was central to his teaching and research, with interests ranging from the proper regulation of banks and financial markets in poorer countries to the historical evolution of global and regional monetary systems in the context of the world dollar standard.
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