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,
#101
Abhijit Banerjee
#863
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#102
Merton Miller
#1290
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Merton Howard Miller was an American economist, and the co-author of the Modigliani–Miller theorem , which proposed the irrelevance of debt-equity structure. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990, along with Harry Markowitz and William F. Sharpe. Miller spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
Go to Profile#103
Tyler Cowen
#783
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education.
Go to Profile#104
Christopher A. Sims
#2779
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Albert Sims is an American econometrician and macroeconomist. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
Go to Profile#105
Michael Porter
#142
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Eugene Porter is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited for creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists.
Go to Profile#106
Guillermo Calvo
#4763
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Guillermo Antonio Calvo is an Argentine-American economist who is director of Columbia University's mid-career Program in Economic Policy Management in their School of International and Public Affairs .
Go to Profile#107
Paul Romer
#917
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Michael Romer is an American economist and policy entrepreneur who is a University Professor in Economics at Boston College. Romer is best known as the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and for co-receiving the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in endogenous growth theory. He also coined the term "mathiness," which he describes as misuse of mathematics in economic research.
Go to Profile#108
John Roemer
#673
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John E. Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
Go to Profile#109
Paul Joskow
#3253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul Lewis Joskow is an American economist and professor. He became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on January 1, 2008. He is also the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, Emeritus at MIT. He has served on the MIT faculty since 1972. From 1994 through 1998 he was Head of the MIT Department of Economics. From 1999 through 2007 he was the Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Since rejoining in 2018 from his 1988-2007 term, Professor Joskow is Research Associate on the National Bureau of Economic Research .
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William F. Sharpe
#834
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
William Forsyth Sharpe is an American economist. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Frank Hahn
#3073
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Frank Horace Hahn FBA was a British economist whose work focused on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, Keynesian economics and critique of monetarism. A famous problem of economic theory, the conditions under which money, which is intrinsically worthless, can have a positive value in a general equilibrium, is called "Hahn's problem" after him. One of Hahn's main abiding concerns was the understanding of Keynesian outcomes in general equilibrium situations.
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Lloyd Shapley
#510
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Lloyd Stowell Shapley was an American mathematician and Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist. He contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory. Shapley is generally considered one of the most important contributors to the development of game theory since the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern. With Alvin E. Roth, Shapley won the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
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Roger Myerson
#1128
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Roger Bruce Myerson is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the college. Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "h...
Go to Profile#114
Robin Hahnel
#1532
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robin Eric Hahnel is an American economist and professor emeritus of economics at American University. He was a professor at American University for many years and traveled extensively advising on economic matters all over the world. He is best known for his work on participatory economics with Z Magazine editor Michael Albert.
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Robert J. Shiller
#847
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert James Shiller is an American economist, academic, and author. As of 2022, he served as a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a fellow at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance. Shiller has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980, was vice president of the American Economic Association in 2005, its president-elect for 2016, and president of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006–2007. He is also the co‑founder and chief economist of the investment management firm MacroMarkets LLC.
Go to Profile#116
Don Patinkin
#3943
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Don Patinkin was an American-born Israeli monetary economist, and the President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Don Patinkin was born January 8, 1922, in Chicago, to a family of Jewish emigrants from Poland. While doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, he also studied the Talmud at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. He continued at Chicago for his graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1947 under the supervision of Oskar R. Lange. Patinkin was a strong Zionist and, while doing his graduate studies, planned to immigrate to Palestine; in his gradu...
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Michael Albert
#1061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Albert is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts. He is known for helping to develop the socioeconomic theory of participatory economics.
Go to Profile#118
Edmond Malinvaud
#3197
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Edmond Malinvaud was a French economist. He was the first president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Trained at the École Polytechnique and at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, Malinvaud was a student of Maurice Allais. In 1950, Malinvaud left Allais to join the Cowles Commission in the United States. At Cowles, Malinvaud produced work in many directions. His famous article, "Capital Accumulation and the Efficient Allocation of Resources" , provided an intertemporal theory of capital for general equilibrium theory and introduced the concept of dynamic efficiency.
Go to Profile#119
Robert C. Merton
#691
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Cox Merton is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the method to determine the value of derivatives.
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Fischer Black
#655
Overall Influence
1938 - 1995 (57 years)
Fischer Sheffey Black was an American economist, best known as one of the authors of the Black–Scholes equation. Background Fischer Sheffey Black was born on January 11, 1938. He graduated from Harvard College in 1959 and received a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1964. He was initially expelled from the PhD program due to his inability to settle on a thesis topic, having switched from physics to mathematics, then to computers and artificial intelligence. Black joined the consultancy Bolt, Beranek and Newman, working on a system for artificial intelligence. He spent a summer developing his ideas at the RAND corporation.
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Theodore Schultz
#1685
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Theodore William Schultz was an American Agricultural economist and chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Economics. Schultz rose to national prominence after winning the 1979 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Robert F. Engle
#1756
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Fry Engle III is an American economist and statistician. He won the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing the award with Clive Granger, "for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility ".
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Peter Diamond
#2816
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Peter Arthur Diamond is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, along with Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On June 6, 2011, he withdrew his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve's board of governors, citing intractable Republican opposition for 14 months.
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Maurice Obstfeld
#4959
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maurice Moses "Maury" Obstfeld is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and previously Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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Dan Ariely
#822
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Dan Ariely is an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. Ariely wrote an advice column called Ask Ariely in the WSJ from June 2012 until September 2022. Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best selling books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. He co-produced the 2015 documentary Honesty: The Truth About Lies.
Go to Profile#126
Sendhil Mullainathan
#1862
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much . He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.
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Ernst Fehr
#2749
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ernst Fehr is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality.
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Mancur Olson
#1096
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr. was an American economist and political scientist who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most influential contributions were in institutional economics, and in the role which private property, taxation, public goods, collective action, and contract rights play in economic development.
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Ha-Joon Chang
#1793
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#130
J. Bradford DeLong
#1368
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong is an economic historian who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers.
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Daniel McFadden
#2882
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Little McFadden is an American econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He is the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and Professor of the Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley.
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Emmanuel Saez
#1932
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#133
Robert H. Frank
#2570
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Harris Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a professor of economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He contributes to the "Economic View" column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times. Frank has published on the topic of wealth inequality in the United States.
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John Muth
#5315
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
John Fraser Muth was an American economist. He is "the father of the rational expectations revolution in economics", primarily due to his article "Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements" from 1961.
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David R. Henderson
#3762
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Richard Henderson is a Canadian-born American economist and author who moved to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1986, serving on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. A research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1990, he took a teaching position with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1984, and is now an emeritus professor of economics.
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Richard Stone
#1922
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone was an eminent British economist. He was educated at Gonville and Caius College and King's College at the University of Cambridge. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale.
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William Easterly
#1589
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#138
Bryan Caplan
#1972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
Go to Profile#139
David Romer
#4948
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Hibbard Romer is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influential economic papers, particularly in the area of New Keynesian economics. He is also the husband and close collaborator of Council of Economic Advisers former Chairwoman Christina Romer.
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Robert Costanza
#2190
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
Go to Profile#141
Harold Demsetz
#2043
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Harold Demsetz was an American professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles . Career Demsetz grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe. He studied engineering, forestry, and philosophy at four universities before being awarded a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois, and an MBA and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. While a graduate student, he published an article each in Econometrica and the Journal of Political Economy.
Go to Profile#142
János Kornai
#4082
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
János Kornai was a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. He also covered macroeconomic aspects in countries undergoing post-Soviet transition. He was emeritus professor at both Harvard University and Corvinus University of Budapest. Kornai was known to have coined the term shortage economy to reflect perpetual shortages of goods in the centrally-planned command economies of the Eastern Bloc.
Go to Profile#143
Arnold Harberger
#2629
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Arnold Carl Harberger is an American economist. His approach to the teaching and practice of economics is to emphasize the use of analytical tools that are directly applicable to real-world issues. His influence on academic economics is reflected in part by the widespread use of the term "Harberger triangle" to refer to the standard graphical depiction of the efficiency cost of distortions of competitive equilibrium. His influence on the practice of economic policy is manifested by the high positions attained by his followers in national agencies such as central banks and ministries of financ...
Go to Profile#144
William Vickrey
#1541
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate. Vickrey was awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in British Columbia.
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Oliver Hart
#1219
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sir Oliver Simon D'Arcy Hart is a British-born American economist, currently the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Together with Bengt R. Holmström, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
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Michio Morishima
#4729
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Michio Morishima was a Japanese heterodox economist and public intellectual who was the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics from 1970 to 1988. He was also professor at Osaka University and member of the British Academy. In 1976 he won the Order of Culture .
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Barry Eichengreen
#2068
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#148
David Card
#2842
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David Edward Card is a Canadian-American labour economist and the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1997. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens jointly awarded the other half.
Go to Profile#149
Andrew Lo
#2471
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrew Wen-Chuan Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lo is the author of many academic articles in finance and financial economics. He founded AlphaSimplex Group in 1999 and served as chairman and chief investment strategist until 2018 when he transitioned to his current role as chairman emeritus and senior advisor.
Go to Profile#150
Abram Bergson
#5399
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Abram Bergson was an American economist, academician, and professor in the Harvard Economics Department since 1956. Early life and education He graduated with an A.B. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1933 and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1935 and 1940, respectively.
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