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,
#1501
Wojciech Kopczuk
#36030
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Wojciech Kopczuk is a professor of economics at Columbia University. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Economics. Biography Kopczuk received his BA and Msc from the University of Warsaw in 1996. He then received his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He taught at the University of British Columbia before joining Columbia University's faculty in 2003. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research's Public Economics program. His research has focused on tax policy and income and wealth inequality. Kopczuk is a critic of the wealt...
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Heidi Hartmann
#10761
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Heidi I. Hartmann is an American feminist economist who is founder and president emerita of the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research , a research organization created to conduct women-centered, public policy research. She retired from her position as President and CEO in 2019.
Go to Profile#1503
Nicholas Barr
#36623
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nicholas Barr FRSA is a British economist, currently serving as professor of public economics at the London School of Economics . He received his Ph.D. in economics as a Fulbright Scholar from the University of California, Berkeley and his MSc in economics from LSE. According to his LSE biography, he has worked for the World Bank, "from 1990 to 1992 working on the design of income transfers and health finance in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, and in 1995–96 as a principal author of the World Bank's World Development Report 1996: From Plan to Market." He also served as an advisor to the...
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Bennett McCallum
#41331
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Bennett Tarlton McCallum was an American monetary economist. He was H. J. Heinz Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. He is known for the McCallum Rule, a monetary policy proposal advocating targeting the growth rate of the monetary base.
Go to Profile#1505
Rolf-Dieter Postlep
#31069
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Rolf-Dieter Postlep is a German economist and President of the University of Kassel from 2000 to 2015. Education Rolf-Dieter Postlep completed his secondary education in 1965 at the Ratsgymnasium in Wolfsburg. He then trained as a banker at the Frankfurter Bank in Frankfurt am Main, Hessen. In 1969 he began studying at the University of Marburg and graduated in 1973 with a degree in economics.
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Rachel McCulloch
#51257
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Rachel McCulloch was an economist and the Rosen Family Professor of International Finance in the Department of Economics and International Business School at Brandeis University. She was a leading figure in the field of international trade, with over 100 published papers, served as a consultant to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, and was a member of the Presidential Commission on Industrial Competitiveness. She also served on the board of directors of the International Trade and Finance Association and on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association. She was the 20...
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Lance E. Davis
#33388
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Lance Edwin Davis was the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He researched the economic history of financial markets and institutional and technological change. His work has been recognised by The Cliometric Society via their awarding him a Clio Can in recognition his of exceptional support of cliometrics.
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Joseph Francois
#43356
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Joseph Francois is a professor of international economics at the University of Bern, where he has taught since 2013. Since 2015, he is also the Managing Director of the World Trade Institute. He is co-director of the European Trade Study Group, which he co-founded in 1999. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and an at-large board member of the Global Trade Analysis Project .
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Richard Murnane
#23871
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard John Murnane is an economist and the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has made important contributions to our understanding of education policy and the relationship between the economy and education. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and coauthored a number of books. His research has investigated what skills are required to earn a middle-class living in the U.S., the significance of the GED, and teacher quality. Murnane earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and is a winner of the Morni...
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Keith Pavitt
#20828
Overall Influence
1937 - 2002 (65 years)
Keith Pavitt was an English scholar in the field of Science and Technology Policy and Innovation Management. He was professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex from 1984 to his death.
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Torben Iversen
#28449
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Torben Iversen is a Danish political economist, currently Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. In 2016, he was named BP Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.
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Jennifer Hunt
#48799
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jennifer Hunt is a professor of economics at Rutgers University. She previously served as deputy assistant secretary for microeconomic analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury after serving a term as Chief Economist to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, serving under acting secretary Seth Harris and Secretary Thomas Perez. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has done research in the areas of employment and unemployment policy, immigration, wage inequality, transition economics, crime and corruption. Her past research focused on immigration and innovation in the United States, the U.S.
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Robert Schlaifer
#21772
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Robert Osher Schlaifer was an American statistician who was a pioneer of Bayesian decision theory. At the time of his death he was William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration Emeritus of the Harvard Business School. In 1961 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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James Foster
#24558
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Eric Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the George Washington University, in the Elliott School of International Affairs, researching welfare economics and poverty measurement. He is known for developing the Alkire Foster Method, with University of Oxford professor and OPHI Director Sabina Alkire. He is a board member for the World Bank.
Go to Profile#1515
Agnès Bénassy-Quéré
#20283
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Agnès Bénassy-Quéré is a French economist who has been serving as Deputy Governor of the Banque de France since 2023. From 2020 to 2023, Bénassy-Quéré was the chief economist at the Direction générale du Trésor . She is also a professor of economics at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and at the Paris School of Economics.
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Gita Sen
#22177
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Gita Sen is an Indian feminist scholar. She is a Distinguished Professor & Director at the Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity & Social Determinants of Health, at the Public Health Foundation of India. She is also an adjunct professor at Harvard University, a professor emeritus at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and the General Coordinator of DAWN .
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Herbert Hovenkamp
#13081
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Herbert Hovenkamp is an American legal scholar serving as James G. Dinan University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that he held the Ben and Dorothy Willie Chair at the University of Iowa College of Law. Hovenkamp is a recognized expert and prolific author in the area of antitrust law.
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Ruy Mauro Marini
#19744
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Ruy Mauro Marini was a Brazilian economist and sociologist. Marini is internationally known as one of the creators of dependency theory. He is the author of the work "Dialéctica de la Dependencia" , in which, using elements of the theory of economic development of Karl Marx adapted to the study of Latin American reality, he explains the necessity of overcoming the developmentalism of ECLAC. He was an activist of the Revolutionary Left Movement of Chile, becoming a member of the Central Community in 1972 and director of his theoretical journal Marxismo y Revolución.
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Enrico Moretti
#47834
Overall Influence
Enrico Moretti is an Italian economist and the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research , and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Institute for the Study of Labor . Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2004, he has taught at UCLA.
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Donald Jacobs
#19142
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Donald Jacobs was an American academic administrator who was dean of Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University from 1975 to 2001. Early life Jacobs was born in the west side of Chicago, and attended Austin High School.
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Michael Reich
#37430
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Reich is a Polish-born economist who primarily focuses on labor economics and political economy. Currently, Reich is a professor of economics and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as director of IRLE from 2004 to 2015. In 1968, he helped found the Union for Radical Political Economics.
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Joe Bain
#45478
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Joe Staten Bain was an American economist associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Bain was designated a Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association in 1982. An accompanying statement referred to him as "the undisputed father of modern Industrial Organization Economics."
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Charles Engel
#65270
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Charles Engel is an American economist and the Hester professor in the economics department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He does research on nominal/real exchange rate movements. Career Engel received a B.A. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. After receiving his doctorate in economics from University of California, Berkeley in 1983, he held faculty positions at the University of Virginia and the University of Washington before moving to University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has since 1989 been a research associate at The National Bureau of Economic Research. He ...
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Ayşe Buğra
#14836
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ayşe Buğra is a Turkish social scientist, currently professor of Political Economy at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History and the co-founder of the Social Policy Forum of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She is a recipient of the TWAS Prize for Social Sciences which she received in 2014.
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Giancarlo Pallavicini
#26993
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Giancarlo Pallavicini is an Italian writer and academic. External links Pallavicini at "Encyclopedia Treccani" website
Go to Profile#1526
Hiroshi Yoshikawa
#41267
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hiroshi Yoshikawa is a Japanese economist and professor of Rissho University. Yoshikawa was born in Tokyo. He won the Nikkei Economic Book Award and the Suntory Award , the Economist Award and the Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Award .
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Luciano Coutinho
#39852
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Luciano Galvão Coutinho is a Brazilian economist and from 2007 until 2016 was the President of the Brazilian Development Bank . Under his direction, BNDES holds over 500 billion dollars in assets. In 2009, Dr. Coutinho has been featured in Epoca's 100 Most Influential Brazilians and in 2010 considered the Financier of the Year by Latin Trade. He is also a guest lecturer at Unicamp University.
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Ulrike Malmendier
#29899
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ulrike M. Malmendier is a German economist who is currently a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. In 2013, she was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association.
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Victor Chernozhukov
#56001
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Victor Chernozhukov is a Russian-American statistician and economist currently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on mathematical statistics and machine learning for causal structural models in high-dimensional environments. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's in statistics in 1997 and received his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2000.
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Werner Baer
#38727
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Werner Baer was an American economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Jorge Lemann Professor of Economics. He received his bachelor's degree from CUNY Queens College in 1953, and a Master's and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955 and 1958 respectively. His research centered on Latin America's industrialization and economic development, especially of Import Substitution Industrialization and Brazil.
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Russell W. Cooper
#66157
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Russell Wade Cooper is an American macroeconomist who is currently a professor at European University Institute in State College, PA. He has previously held academic positions at the University of Texas, Yale University, the University of Iowa, Pennsylvania State University and Boston University. Cooper received his Bachelors in Economics and International Relations at Clark University, and received his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has published over 60 publications ranging from labor economics to game theory, and four books as of 2017. He is best known for his work on coordination games.
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Devaki Jain
#27861
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Devaki Jain is an Indian economist and writer, who has worked mainly in the field of feminist economics. In 2006 she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award from Government of India, for her contribution to social justice and the empowerment of women.
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Jennifer Carpenter
#39180
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jennifer N. Carpenter is an American finance academic best known for her pioneering research into executive stock options. Other interests include fund manager compensation, survivorship bias, corporate bonds, and option pricing. She has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Business.
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Güven Sak
#79320
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Güven Sak is a Turkish economist and academic. Born in Bursa, Turkey, Sak graduated from the University of East Anglia with a master's degree in economics in 1984, and with a PhD in economics from the Middle East Technical University in 1994. He was a founding member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, to which he was appointed as an external member in 2001 for a five-year term. He was rector of TOBB University of Economics and Technology from 2011 to 2013, and is currently managing director of the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey .
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Paul Klemperer
#27299
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Paul David Klemperer FBA is an economist and the Edgeworth Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Oxford University. He is a member of the Klemperer family. He works on industrial economics, competition policy, auction theory, and climate change economics and policy.
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Andrew Tylecote
#41034
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Tylecote is a British economist based at The University of Sheffield School of Management. He is best known for his work on the economics of technological change, and for his contributions to long wave economic theory.
Go to Profile#1537
John Weyant
#66925
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John P. Weyant is a research professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. He obtained his PhD from UC Berkeley in management science in 1976 and has been at Stanford since 1977. His research is focused on climate change, energy security, corporate strategy analysis, and energy policy in Japan.
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Martin Stopford
#30925
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Martin Stopford is a British economist and has had careers as a teacher, writer, information provider and business manager. Stopford is regularly quoted by The Economist, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and Lloyds List. He received a Lloyd's List Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. He is a director of Clarksons plc, the world's largest shipbroker.
Go to Profile#1539
Kwik Kian Gie
#17306
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Kwik Kian Gie is an Indonesian economist and politician who served as the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs from 1999 to 2000, the Minister of National Development Planning from 2001 to 2004, as well as briefly serving as the Deputy Speakers of the People's Consultative Assembly in 1999. He is a prominent Indonesian economist who often wrote columns in the newspaper KOMPAS criticizing the policies of the Suharto administration in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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Joseph Stanislaw
#41320
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Stanislaw is a financial adviser on international markets and politics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy that was acquired in 2004 by IHS Energy.
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James B. Ramsey
#56283
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
James Bernard Ramsey was an American econometrician. He was a professor of economics at New York University, and was chair of the economics department between 1978 and 1987. Ramsey received his B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of British Columbia in 1963, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1968 with the thesis "Tests for Specification Errors in Classical Linear Least Squares Regression Analysis", which was later partially published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. It contained the RESET test for misspecification...
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Philip Oreopoulos
#36261
Overall Influence
Philip Oreopoulos is an economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Oreopoulos's research focuses on the economics of education, labour economics, and public finance.
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Tom Colbjørnsen
#20622
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Tom Colbjørnsen is a Norwegian economist and sociologist, and was the President of the BI Norwegian Business School from 2006 to 2014. Colbjørnsen graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics with a siv.øk. degree in 1976 and received his dr.philos. degree from the University of Bergen in 1984. He was a professor at NHH when he in 2006 was appointed as the new President at BI Norwegian Business School.
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Ilham Tohti
#9896
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ilham Tohti is a Uyghur economist serving a life sentence in China, on separatism-related charges. He is a vocal advocate for the implementation of regional autonomy laws in China, was the host of Uyghur Online, a website founded in 2006 that discusses Uyghur issues, and is known for his research on Uyghur-Han relations. Ilham was summoned from his Beijing home and detained shortly after the July 2009 Ürümqi riots by the authorities because of his criticism of the Chinese government's policies toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Ilham was released on August 23 after international pressure and condemnation.
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John C. Williams
#39095
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
John Carroll Williams is the president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, having also served as president of Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2011 to 2018. He is currently serving as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee.
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Nurul Islam
#9252
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Nurul Islam was a Bangladeshi economist, philanthropist, and politician. Islam is famous for his contributions during the independence war of Bangladesh, as well as for his pivotal role in the economy and foreign affairs during the 1970’s as Cabinet Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. He was the closest advisor to, and confidant of, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman throughout the 1960s and until the Prime Minister's assassination in 1975. Islam is responsible for establishing Bangladesh's economy, financial system, and trade relationships; his leadership laid the foundations for Bangladesh's unprecedented economic growth over the last 5 decades.
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Michael Storper
#35167
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Storper is an economic and urban geographer who teaches at the University of California , Sciences Po and London School of Economics. Biography Michael Storper completed a bachelor's degree in sociology and history in 1975, followed by a masters in 1979 and a PhD in geography in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1548
Simplice Anutechia Asongu
#79747
Overall Influence
#1549
Wolfgang Wiegard
#34266
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wolfgang Wiegard is a German economist and member of the German Council of Economic Experts. He served as chairman of the council from April 2002 to March 2005. Born in Berlin, Wiegard studied at the University of Heidelberg, receiving his doctoral degree in economics in 1981. Since 1999 Wiegard holds a tenured professorship in economics at the University of Regensburg.
Go to Profile#1550
Sune Carlson
#39941
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Sune Carlson was a Swedish economist. He was considered a pioneer in establishing international business as a research area. Life and work Carlson obtained his master's of arts degree in economics at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1932 and his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1936.
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