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,
#151
Robert Dorfman
#2158
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Robert Dorfman was professor of political economy at Harvard University. Dorfman made great contributions to the fields of economics, statistics, group testing and in the process of coding theory. His paper—'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' is a landmark in the sphere of Combinatorial Group Testing. To quote collaborator and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow—"After starting his career as a statistician—his paper 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' is still a landmark—he turned to economics at the moment when linear models of production and allocati...
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Raghuram Rajan
#709
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund. From September 2013 through September 2016 he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In 2015, during his tenure at the RBI, he became the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements.
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Bengt Holmström
#2503
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bengt Robert Holmström is a Finnish economist who is currently Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together with Oliver Hart, he received the Central Bank of Sweden Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
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Albert O. Hirschman
#1281
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Albert Otto Hirschman was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth. He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills. Key to this was encouraging industries with many linkages to other firms.
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Christine Lagarde
#332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde is a French politician and lawyer who has served as President of the European Central Bank since 2019. She previously served as the 11th Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2019. Lagarde had also served in the Government of France, most prominently as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 2007 until 2011. She is the first woman to hold each of those posts.
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Harvey S. Rosen
#4707
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Harvey Sheldon Rosen is an American economist and academic. Prior to his retirement and subsequent appointment as Emeritus Professor in 2019, Rosen was the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University, and former chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers. His research focuses on public finance. Harvard University economist and former Council of Economic Advisers chairman Greg Mankiw credits Rosen as one of four mentors who taught him how to practice economics, along with Alan Blinder, Larry Summers, and Stanley Fischer.
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Henri Theil
#2584
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Henri Theil was a Dutch econometrician and professor at the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam, known for his contributions to the field of econometrics. Biography Born in Amsterdam, Theil started to study mathematics and physics at Utrecht University in 1942. Later in World War II he was arrested and was imprisoned in Vught. After the war he started to study economics at the Gemeente-Universiteit Amsterdam, where in 1951 he received his PhD under Pieter Hennipman.
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Luigi Pasinetti
#4845
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Luigi L. Pasinetti was an Italian economist of the post-Keynesian school. Pasinetti was considered the heir of the "Cambridge Keynesians" and a student of Piero Sraffa and Richard Kahn. Along with them, as well as Joan Robinson, he was one of the prominent members on the "Cambridge, UK" side of the Cambridge capital controversy. His contributions to economics include developing the analytical foundations of neo-Ricardian economics, including the theory of value and distribution, as well as work in the line of Kaldorian theory of growth and income distribution. He also developed the theory of ...
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Robert Rubin
#471
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robert Edward Rubin is an American retired banking executive, lawyer, and former government official. He served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. Before his government service, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs, eventually serving as a member of the board and co-chairman from 1990 to 1992.
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Avinash Dixit
#3929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Avinash Kamalakar Dixit is an Indian-American economist. He is the John J. F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University, and has been Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at Lingnan University , senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Sanjaya Lall Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.
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Robert Skidelsky
#2922
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky, is a British economic historian. He is the author of a three-volume award-winning biography of British economist John Maynard Keynes . Skidelsky read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, England.
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Paul Milgrom
#2760
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paul Robert Milgrom is an American economist. He is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, a position he has held since 1987. He is a professor in the Stanford School of Engineering as well and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Research. Milgrom is an expert in game theory, specifically auction theory and pricing strategies. He is the winner of the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Robert B. Wilson, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new ...
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Steven N. S. Cheung
#3761
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Steven Ng-Sheong Cheung is a Hong Kong-born American economist who specializes in the fields of transaction costs and property rights, following the approach of new institutional economics. He achieved his public fame with an economic analysis on China open-door policy after the 1980s. In his studies of economics, he focuses on economic explanation that is based on real world observation . He is also the first to introduce concepts from the Chicago School of Economics, especially price theory, into China. In 2016, Cheung claimed to have written "1,500 articles and 20 books in Chinese" during...
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Nouriel Roubini
#1318
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#165
Martin Shubik
#2497
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Martin Shubik was an American mathematical economist who specialized in game theory, defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions. The latter was his main research interest and he coined the term "mathematical institutional economics" in 1959 to describe it and referred to it as his "white whale" . He spent the majority of his career at Yale University, where he was heavily involved with the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, and launched the virtual Museum of Money and Financial Institutions.
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Anne Osborn Krueger
#4633
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Anne Osborn Krueger is an American economist. She was the World Bank Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2006. She is currently the senior research professor of international economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She also is a senior fellow of Center for International Development and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities' Economics Department at Stanford University.
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Koichi Hamada
#6292
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
is the Tuntex Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, where he specializes in the Japanese economy and international economics. Hamada also serves as economic adviser to Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and is credited as one of the key architects of Abenomics, economic policies based upon "three arrows" of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform. From January 2001 to July 2002, Hamada served as the first president of the Economic and Social Research Institute of the Cabinet Office of the Japanese Government. At one time Hamada was also a contender to head the WTO.
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Evsey Domar
#6352
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Evsey David Domar was a Russian American economist, famous as developer of the Harrod–Domar model. Life Evsey Domar was born on April 16, 1914, in the Polish city of Łódź, which was part of Russia at that time. He was raised and educated in Russian Manchuria in the Russian Far East, then emigrated to the United States in 1936.
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G. L. S. Shackle
#4788
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
George Lennox Sharman Shackle was an English economist. He made a practical attempt to challenge classical rational choice theory and has been characterised as a "post-Keynesian", though he is influenced as well by Austrian economics. Much of his work is associated with the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence.
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Colin Camerer
#3013
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Colin Farrell Camerer is an American behavioral economist, and Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology . Background A former child prodigy, Camerer received a B.A. in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 , followed by an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago in 1979 and a Ph.D. in behavioral decision theory from that same institution in 1981 for thesis titled The Validity and Utility of Expert Judgment under the supervision of Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth. Camerer worked at Kellogg, Wharton, an...
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Lorie Tarshis
#6498
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian economist who taught mostly at Stanford University. He is credited with writing the first introductory textbook that brought Keynesian thinking into American university classrooms, the 1947 Elements of Economics. The work swiftly lost popularity after it was charged with excessive sympathy to communism by McCarthyist activists. Instead, the 1948 Economics by Paul Samuelson brought the Keynesian revolution to the United States.
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Walter E. Williams
#1752
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Walter Edward Williams was an American economist, commentator, and academic. Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author. Known for his classical liberal and libertarian views, Williams's writings frequently appeared in Townhall, WND, and Jewish World Review. Williams was also a popular guest host of the Rush Limbaugh radio show when Limbaugh was unavailable.
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Lionel W. McKenzie
#6472
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Lionel Wilfred McKenzie was an American economist. He was the Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Rochester. He was born in Montezuma, Georgia. He completed undergraduate studies at Duke University in 1939 and subsequently moved to Oxford that year as a Rhodes Scholar. McKenzie worked with the Cowles Commission while it was in Chicago and served as an assistant professor at Duke from 1948 to 1957. Having received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1956, McKenzie moved to Rochester where he was responsible for the establishment of the graduate program in economics.
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Nobuo Okishio
#5476
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Nobuo Okishio was a Japanese Marxian economist and emeritus professor of Kobe University. In 1979, he was elected President of the Japan Association of Economics and Econometrics, which is now called Japanese Economic Association.
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Jordi Galí
#6085
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.
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Gabriel Zucman
#2266
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
#177
John H. Cochrane
#3427
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
John Howland Cochrane is an American economist specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. Formerly a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago, Cochrane serves full-time as the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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George Loewenstein
#4022
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
George Loewenstein is an American educator and economist. He is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He is a leader in the fields of behavioral economics , neuroeconomics, Judgment and Decision Making.
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Philip Mirowski
#2488
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979. Career In his 1989 book More Heat than Light, Mirowski reveals a history of how physics has drawn inspiration from economics and how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. He traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics, the modern orthodox theory. Mirowski's thesis has been challenged by Hal Varian and defended, with some reservations, by D.
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Carl Shapiro
#4622
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carl Shapiro is an American economist and academic who serves as the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. He is the co-author, along with Hal Varian of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, published by the Harvard Business School Press. On February 23, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that President Barack Obama intended to nominate Shapiro to his Council of Economic Advisers.
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Michael Hudson
#3141
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. He is a contributor to The Hudson Report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.
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Victoria Chick
#9181
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Victoria Chick was a Post Keynesian economist known for her essays on monetary theory, banking and methodology. Her writing on Keynes's General Theory made her one of the foremost interpreters of his work. After the 2008 banking crisis she coined a corollary to Gresham's Law, arguing that in orthodox economics "bad theory drives out good."
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Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
#3091
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist. He is best known today for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
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Joan Martinez Alier
#3991
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Joan Martinez Alier is a Catalan economist, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and researcher at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has made important contributions in ecological economics and political ecology, which he synthesised in his work on environmentalism of the poor.
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Zvi Griliches
#7575
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Hirsh Zvi Griliches was an economist at Harvard University. The works by Zvi Griliches mostly concerned the economics of technological change, including empirical studies of diffusion of innovations and the role of R & D, patents, and education. In 2023 he had 126 publication listed in Web of Science and a Hirsch index of 49, which places him into 2% of most productive economics professors in the USA.
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Robert Heilbroner
#2309
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Robert L. Heilbroner was an American economist and historian of economic thought. The author of some 20 books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers , a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.
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Hans-Werner Sinn
#3470
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans-Werner Sinn is a German economist who served as President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 to 2016. He currently serves on the German economy ministry’s advisory council. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich.
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Walter Isard
#2909
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Walter Isard was a prominent American economist, the principal founder of the discipline of regional science, as well as one of the main founders of the discipline of peace studies and Peace economics.
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Dominique Strauss-Kahn
#398
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn , also known as DSK, is a French economist and politician who served as the tenth managing director of the International Monetary Fund , and was a member of the French Socialist Party.
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Elhanan Helpman
#4923
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Elhanan Helpman is an Israeli economist who is currently the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. Helpman is among the thirty most cited economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc.
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Jeffrey Frankel
#5531
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jeffrey Alexander "Jeff" Frankel is an international macroeconomist. He works as the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School. Education Frankel graduated from Swarthmore College in 1974 with a B.A. in economics. He then received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1978.
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Robert J. Gordon
#4051
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert James Gordon is an American economist. He is the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. Gordon is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. His recent work asking whether economic growth in the US is “almost over” has been widely cited, and in 2016, he was named one of the 50 most influential people in the world by Bloomberg.
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Partha Dasgupta
#3331
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta is an Indian-British economist who is Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.
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Richard Ebeling
#3657
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard M. Ebeling is an American libertarian author who was the president of the Foundation for Economic Education from 2003 to 2008. Ebeling is currently the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
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L. Randall Wray
#5796
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Larry Randall Wray is a professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, whose faculty he joined in August 1999, and a professor at the University of Denver, where he served from 1987 to 1999. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Rome, Italy, the University of Paris, France, and the UNAM, in Mexico City. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bologna. From 2015 he is a visiting professor at the University of Bergamo, located in Italy.
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Axel Leijonhufvud
#7600
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Axel Leijonhufvud was a Swedish economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles , and professor at the University of Trento, Italy. Leijonhufvud focused his studies on macroeconomic monetary theory. In his defining book On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes he focuses on a critique of the interpretation of Keynesian economic theory by Keynesian economists. He goes on to call the standard neoclassical synthesis interpretation of the Keynes' General Theory as having misunderstood and misinterpreted Keynes. In one of his papers, "Life Among the Econ" ,...
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Justin Wolfers
#5190
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Justin James Michael Wolfers, born in 1972, is an Australian economist and public policy scholar. He is professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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Melissa Dell
#5325
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund named Dell among the 25 Brightest Young Economists. In 2018, she was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the Calvó-Armengol International Prize; The Economist also named her one of "the decade’s eight best young economists." She was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2020.
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Christina Romer
#2248
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.
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C. Fred Bergsten
#4292
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
C. Fred Bergsten is an American economist, author, think tank entrepreneur, and policy adviser. He has served as assistant for international economic affairs to Henry Kissinger within the National Security Council and as assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He was the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, until 2006 the Institute for International Economics, which he established in 1981 and led through 2012. In addition to his academic work, he has been an influential public commentator and advisor to the Amer...
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