Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Economics,

#1701

Steven S. Wildman

Steven S. Wildman

#43797

Overall Influence

Steven S. Wildman is a U.S. scholar, academician and researcher who teaches and researches at one of the top-rated American communicationss programs at the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Wildman also serves as co-director of the university's Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law.

#1702

Ray Hilborn

#41363

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ray Hilborn is a marine biologist and fisheries scientist, known for his work on conservation and natural resource management in the context of fisheries. He is currently professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington. He focuses on conservation, natural resource management, fisheries stock assessment and risk analysis, and advises several international fisheries commissions and agencies.

#1703

Tõnu Puu

#24417

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Tõnu Puu was an Estonian-born Swedish economist. He has been Professor of Economics at Umeå University. Personal Tõnu Puu took refuge from Estonia to Sweden upon the Soviet invasion in 1944, with his parents and one sister.

#1704

Thomas Sterner

#65456

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Thomas Nils Samuel Sterner is Swedish economist and a professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His research and publications are mostly focused on the design of policy instruments which address environmental problems. Sterner has published more than 125 articles in refereed journals. He has a Google scholar h-index of 50 . He authored or edited more than a dozen books and a large number of book chapters, official reports and journalistic articles regarding environmental policy instruments. These publications include applications to energy, climate, indus...

#1705

George Barclay Richardson

#50846

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

George Barclay Richardson was a British economist, who was Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1989 to 1994. Life George Barclay Richardson was born in 1924 and educated at Aberdeen Central Secondary School before studying at the University of Aberdeen, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1944. After joining the Admiralty's Scientific Research Department in 1944, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in 1945; he was then posted to the British Army on the Rhine as an Intelligence Officer. He then studied Politics, Philosoph...

#1706

Mary E. Lovely

#64138

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mary Elizabeth Lovely is a professor emeritus of economics at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. She is a senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. Lovely often appears on national media as an expert on China-US trade, international economic integration, and public economics.

#1707

Albert Rees

#38993

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Albert E. Rees was an American economist and noted author. An influential labor economist, Rees taught at Princeton University from 1966 to 1979, while also being an advisor to President Gerald Ford. He was also a former Provost of Princeton and former president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He was also the first head of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, a short-lived federal agency.

#1708

Miroslav Singer

Miroslav Singer

#45321

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Miroslav Singer is a Czech economist who served as the third governor of the Czech National Bank from 2010 to 2016. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995. See also Czech National Bank

#1709

Rebecca M. Henderson

Rebecca M. Henderson

#29532

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Rebecca M. Henderson, FBA is a British economist, currently the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School. She teaches Reimagining Capitalism in the Master of Business Administration Program.

#1710

Matilde Bombardini

#48178

Overall Influence

Matilde Bombardini is an Italian economist, who is a professor of Economics of International Trade at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia , Vancouver. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Institutions, Organisations & Growth Program since June 2007 and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research for the Political Economy Program since April 2009.

#1711

Hu Angang

#26444

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hu Angang is an economics professor at Tsinghua University. Hu Angang was born on 27 April 1953. He is a professor in the School of Public Policy & Management at Tsinghua University as well as Director of the Center for China Study at Tsinghua-CAS .

#1712

James Meredith

#867

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

James Howard Meredith is an American civil rights activist, writer, political adviser, and United States Air Force veteran who became, in 1962, the first African-American student admitted to the racially segregated University of Mississippi after the intervention of the federal government . Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi. His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans. The admission of Meredith ignited the Ole M...

#1713

Giorgos Kallis

#24468

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist from Greece. He is an ICREA Research Professor at ICTA - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he teaches political ecology. He is one of the principal advocates of the theory of degrowth.

#1714

Kurt W. Rothschild

Kurt W. Rothschild

#55658

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

[[File:|thumb|200px]] Kurt Wilhelm Rothschild was a well known Austrian born economist. He lectured at the University of Glasgow , worked as a researcher at the Austrian Economic Research Institute and was one founding fathers of the University of Linz, working there from 1966 until 1985. His work in economics was wide ranging running from contributions to microeconomic and macroeconomic theory and history of economic thought to questions of both economic methodology and economic policy. Throughout his career, he advocated pluralism in economics and took a critical approach to what came to ...

#1715

Julian Alston

#84119

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Julian Alston is an Australian American economist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Director of the Robert Mondavi Institute at University of California, Davis, and also a published author. He is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and Distinguished Fellow of Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. Alston received his Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University in 1984.

#1716

Susan M. Phillips

Susan M. Phillips

#34262

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Susan Meredith Phillips is an American economist who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1991 to 1998. She was the third woman to sit on the Board. After leaving the Fed, Phillips served as dean of the George Washington University School of Business from 1998 to 2010.

#1717

Joseph Altonji

#44185

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Joseph Gerard Altonji is an American labour economist and the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University. His fields of interest include macroeconomics and applied econometrics and in particular labour economics, being ranked as one of the foremost labour economists worldwide. In 2018, his contributions to the analysis of labour supply, family economics and discrimination were rewarded with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

#1718

Hardy Hanappi

#46828

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Hardy Hanappi , son of Gerhard Hanappi, is a European political economist. He is ad personam Jean Monnet Chair for Political Economy of European Integration and professor at the Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Methods in Economics of the TU Wien.

#1719

Larry G. Epstein

#67150

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Larry G. Epstein is a Canadian economist who is currently Professor of Economics at McGill University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association and Econometric Society. He was also Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada before moving to the United States.

#1720

Garett Jones

#41278

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Garett Jones is an American economist and author. His research pertains to the fields of macroeconomics, monetary policy, IQ in relation to productivity, short-term business cycles, and economic development. He is an associate professor at George Mason University and the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center.

#1721

Jonathan Michie

#17414

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jonathan Michie is a British economist who is president of Kellogg College, Oxford, where he is professor of innovation and knowledge exchange. Early life Michie is the son of the biologist Dame Anne McLaren and computer scientist Donald Michie, and brother of the academic psychologist Susan Michie.

#1722

Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden

#28005

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden is a German economist, professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Mannheim, and has been president of Mannheim University since October 2012. Previously he was professor of Economics at the Département d'Econométrie et Economie Politique at the University of Lausanne.

#1723

Jesse W. Markham

#42528

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Jesse William Markham was an American economist. Markham was best known for his work on antitrust policy, price theory and industrial organization. Markham was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School , and the former chief economist to the Federal Trade Commission.

#1724

Vela Velupillai

#26926

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Kumaraswamy Velupillai is an academic economist and a Senior Visiting Professor at the Madras School of Economics and was, formerly, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Professore di Chiara Fama in the Department of Economics at the University of Trento, Italy.

#1725

Kenneth E. Train

#58199

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Kenneth E. Train is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He is also Vice President of NERA Economic Consulting, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He received a Bachelors in Economics at Harvard and PhD from UC Berkeley. He specializes in econometrics and regulation, with applications in energy, environmental studies, telecommunications and transportation.

#1726

Erkin Bairam

#58377

Overall Influence

1958 - 2001 (43 years)

Erkin Bairam was a Cypriot-born economist who taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, Bairam studied at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, where he gained a BA in Economics in 1980. He left Essex for the University of Hull, where he was awarded an MA in econometrics in 1982. He then began work on his PhD thesis entitled "Returns to Scale, Technical Progress and Industrial Growth in the USSR and Eastern Europe: An Empirical Study, 1961-75", with John McCombie as his supervisor. He was awarded his doctorate in 1986 and the following year was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Otago.

#1727

Edward Kane

#51987

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Edward J. Kane was an American economist and writer. He was a long-time student of incentive conflict in financial regulation and in crisis-management policies. His writing contends that too-big-to-fail policies are rooted in the cultural norms of major central banks around the world.

#1728

George Constantinides

#35234

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

George M. Constantinides is a financial economist, known for his work on portfolio management, asset pricing, derivatives pricing, and capital markets behavior. He is the Leo Melamed Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a board member of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

#1729

Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis

#24790

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 , a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January 2015 and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009-2018 Greek government-debt crisis.

#1730

André Sapir

#33496

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

André Sapir is a Belgian economist and professor at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management . He is also a senior fellow at Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank. Professional career Sapir holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Bela Balassa. He then was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from 1977 to 1982, before returning to his native Brussels.

#1731

Robert A. Pollak

#76944

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Robert A. Pollak is an economist. Pollak has made contributions to the specification and estimation of consumer demand systems, social choice theory, the theory of the cost of living index, and since the early 1980s, to the economics of the family and to demography. He is currently the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis, holding joint appointments in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and in the Olin Business School.

#1732

Philip Lowe

#47014

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Philip Lowe is an Australian economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, from September 2016 to September 2023. He was also deputy governor under Glenn Stevens from February 2012 to September 2016.

#1733

Paul Newbold

#58526

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

Paul Newbold was a British economist known for his contributions to econometrics and time series analysis. His most famous contribution was a 1974 paper co-authored with Clive Granger which introduced the concept of spurious regressions.

#1734

Kenneth Alexander

#60910

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Sir Kenneth John Wilson Alexander was a Scottish economist and university administrator. He also had strong links to the Scottish steel and shipbuilding industries. Life He was born in Edinburgh, the son of William Wilson Alexander. He won a scholarship to George Heriot's School and then, after service in the RAF in the Second World War, studied at the Bonar College of Economics in Dundee graduating with first class honours in 1949. He did postgraduate research at Leeds University 1949 to 1951 then lectured at Sheffield University until 1956 when he moved to lecture at Aberdeen University.

#1735

Debapriya Bhattacharya

Debapriya Bhattacharya

#31507

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Debapriya Bhattacharya is an economist and public policy analyst from Bangladesh. He was the first executive director of Centre for Policy Dialogue in Dhaka. He also worked as a senior research fellow at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies .

#1736

William Oakland

#49503

Overall Influence

1939 - 2007 (68 years)

William Horace Oakland was an American Economist and Economics Professor at Tulane University. Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Oakland received his BA in Economics from the University of Massachusetts in 1961 and Ph.D in Industrial Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965.

#1737

Barbara Baarsma

Barbara Baarsma

#85393

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Barbara Elisabeth Baarsma is a Dutch economist, and Professor of Market Forces and Competition Issues at the University of Amsterdam. Biography Born in Leiden, Baarsma grew up in Goeree-Overflakkee, where her father was otolaryngologist. After attending the Atheneum in Middelharnis, in 1988 she started studying Industrial Design at the Delft University of Technology. In 1989 she moved to the University of Amsterdam, where she received her MA cum laude in Economics in 1993, and her PhD in Economics in 2000 with a thesis entitled "Monetary valuation of environmental goods: Alternatives to conti...

#1738

Judith Rees

#32762

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Dame Judith Anne Rees, , is a distinguished academic geographer, was interim director of London School of Economics and Political Science from May 2011 until September 2012. Professor Rees also acts as director for its Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and is Vice-Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

#1739

Paul Glimcher

#35877

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Paul W. Glimcher is an American neuroeconomist, neuroscientist, psychologist, economist, scholar, and entrepreneur. He is one of the foremost researchers focused on the study of human behavior and decision-making, and is known for his central role in founding and developing the field of neuroeconomics which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how humans make decisions. Glimcher also founded the Institute for the Study of Decision Making at New York University . Today he serves as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Neurosciences Institute at NYU's Gros...

#1740

Philip J. Cook

#19734

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Philip Jackson Cook is the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in the United States. He also holds faculty appointments in Duke's departments of sociology, and economics. His research has focused on crime and criminal justice policy; weapons and violent crime; health and safety regulation including alcohol taxation and the societal costs of drinking; the economics of state lotteries; and income distribution.

#1741

Isaiah Andrews

#58914

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Isaiah Andrews is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a co-editor of the American Economic Review. In 2018, The Economist named him one of the 8 "best young economists of the decade." He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020 and in 2021, the American Economic Association awarded him the John Bates Clark Medal.

#1742

Aleksander Welfe

#70419

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Aleksander Welfe is a professor of economics at the University of Łódź and the Warsaw School of Economics , and Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the 2023–2026 term. He has served as an advisor to the governor of the National Bank of Poland. Within the field of economics, he specializes in methods of analyzing time series and macromodeling.

#1743

Timo Teräsvirta

#48933

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Timo Teräsvirta is a Finnish economist. He made notable contributions in time series analysis, working with Clive Granger among others. Teräsvirta earned his Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki in 1970, under the supervision of Leo Törnqvist.

#1744

Stephen G. Cecchetti

#70562

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Stephen G Cecchetti is an American economist who has been the Barbara and Richard M Rosenberg Professor of Global Finance at Brandeis International Business School. His principal fields of interest are macroeconomics, monetary economics, financial economics, monetary policy, central banking, and the supply of money.

#1745

Noreena Hertz

#21563

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Noreena Hertz is an English academic, economist and bestselling author, who sits on the boards of Mattel, Warner Music Group and Workhuman. She has been Honorary Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London since 2014.

#1746

Yoram Ben-Porat

#19427

Overall Influence

1937 - 1992 (55 years)

Yoram Ben-Porat was an Israeli academic and economist. He served as president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1990 until his death in 1992 in an automobile accident at the age of 55. Biography Ben-Porat was born in Ramat Gan, Israel.

#1747

Christian Marazzi

#32201

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Christian Marazzi is a Swiss economist and author. Biography He was born in Lugano, Switzerland in 1951. Education He graduated in political science from the University of Padua. He completed his master's degree in economics at the London School of Economics.

#1748

Stefano DellaVigna

#47983

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Stefano DellaVigna is an Italian economist and the Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Como, Italy, he emigrated to the United States when he was 18. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research focuses on behavioral economics, and he is a co-director of the Initiative for Behavioral Economics and Finance. He has published studies on the effects of Fox News on voter behavior, the effects...

#1749

Martin Weale

#57220

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Martin Robert Weale is a British economist. He was educated at Highgate School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he qualified for an MA in Economics, with first-class honours, and was later a fellow from 1981 to 1995. On 5 July 2010 it was announced that he would join the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, replacing Kate Barker. He was in turn replaced by Michael Saunders, attending his last meeting in July 2016.

#1750

Heinz Arndt

#32688

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Heinz Wolfgang Arndt was a German-born Australian economist. Biography Heinz Wolfgang Arndt was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1915, the eldest son of Fritz Georg Arndt and Julia . Arndt gained two degrees at Oxford and taught at the London School of Economics and University of Manchester before settling in Australia in 1946. While studying in England, he married his wife Ruth with whom he later lived in Canberra until her death in 2001. In 1950, Arndt took up a chairmanship in economics at the then Canberra University College. He became head of the department at the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University in 1963.

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