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,
#1751
Philippe Frémeaux
#25514
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Philippe Frémeaux was a French economic journalist with the magazine Alternatives économiques. Biography After his studies in economic science, public rights, and political science, Frémeaux pursued a career in teaching, journalism, and consulting. He first worked as a professor of social sciences and economics at Sciences Po from 1975 to 1983. He was also a lecturer at CELSA Paris in the 2000s. As a consultant, Frémeaux worked for Le BIPE from 1983 to 1999, where he led numerous advisory missions for the French Ministry of Industry and the European Commission.
Go to Profile#1752
Ann E. Harrison
#31921
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ann E. Harrison is the 15th Dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and the second woman to head the top-ranked business school. Dean Harrison is a renowned economist and one of the most highly-cited scholars on foreign investment and multinational firms.
Go to Profile#1753
Carol Corrado
#45448
Overall Influence
Carol A. Corrado is an American economist who was the former chief of industrial output at the Federal Reserve Board and currently serves as a senior advisor and research director in economics on The Conference Board. She serves as a member of the executive committee for the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference on research on income and wealth. She is a senior policy scholar at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Centre for Business and Public Policy where she focuses on economics of growth and innovation as well as fiscal and monetary policies. In addition to thes...
Go to Profile#1754
Serajul Islam Choudhury
#15468
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Serajul Islam Choudhury is a Bangladeshi literary critic, public intellectual, social and political analyst, activist, historian, educationist, editor, translator, columnist, and professor emeritus at the University of Dhaka. He is the editor of Natun Diganta. Considered one of the foremost oppositional intellectuals of Bangladesh, he authored nearly a hundred books and countless essays in Bangla and English.
Go to Profile#1755
Bruce Sacerdote
#40234
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Bruce Sacerdote is an American economist and the Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics at Dartmouth College, where he "enjoy[s] working with detailed data to enhance our understanding of why children and youth turn out the way they do. [He is] also involved in a series of studies to examine how students make choices about college going and how policy makers might influence that decision-making process."
Go to Profile#1756
Alexandre Kafka
#49021
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Alexandre Kafka was an international economist mainly known for his work as an Executive Director in the International Monetary Fund . Biography Kafka was born in Prague to a family with Jewish heritage in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Bruno Kafka, was a member of the parliament of Czechoslovakia and a second cousin of author Franz Kafka. He was educated in Geneva and Balliol College at Oxford University. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Germany in 1939 pushed his family to emigrate, settling in Brazil in 1940, with Kafka becoming a Brazilian citizen. As Denis Healey, a contempor...
Go to Profile#1757
Iris Bohnet
#37427
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Iris Bohnet is a Swiss behavioral economist, and the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the Academic Dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her work focuses primarily on issues of gender, trust, and social preferences.
Go to Profile#1758
Marcel Fafchamps
#83472
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marcel Fafchamps is a Belgian economist and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies . He belongs to the leading economists in the field of rural development. Biography A native of Belgium, Marcel Fafchamps earned undergraduate degrees in law and economics from the Catholic University of Louvain in 1978 and 1980, respectively. After his studies and military service, between 1981 and 1985, he worked for the International Labour Organization on rural development, being based in Addis Ababa. Pursuing an interest in research, Fafchamps then earned a Ph.D. in agricul...
Go to Profile#1759
Shailendra Raj Mehta
#18245
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Shailendra Raj Mehta is an Indian economist who is specialized in Microeconomics theory, institution design, industrial organization, Information economics, Experimental economics, strategic management and Entrepreneurship. He was chairman of the Board of Management at Auro University. In 2017, he became the President and Director of MICA , Ahmedabad.
Go to Profile#1760
Srikant Datar
#6119
Overall Influence
Srikant Datar is an Indian-American economist and the Dean of Harvard Business School. At Harvard, he concurrently serves as the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration. Early life Datar attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with distinction in mathematics and economics from St. Xavier's College, University of Mumbai in 1973. At IIM Ahmedabad, he was a gold medalist and the General Secretary of the Student's Council . He is a chartered accountant and holds two master's degrees and a doctorate from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1761
Melvin J. Hinich
#41889
Overall Influence
1939 - 2010 (71 years)
Melvin Jay "Mel" Hinich was a professor of government and economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Hinich was also a research professor at UT's Applied Research Laboratories. Known as an expert in political science with a long record of distinction in a number of fields, he wrote seven books and published more than 200 papers in statistics/statistical theory, signal processing, economics, political science, biomedical engineering, pharmacy, and library science.
Go to Profile#1762
Michael Fritsch
#46291
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Fritsch is professor of Economics and Chair of Business Dynamics, Innovation, and Economic Change at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He is also an Associate Editor of the academic journal Small Business Economics.
Go to Profile#1763
Andrzej Koźmiński
#12854
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Andrzej Krzysztof Koźmiński is a professor of management, the founder of Kozminski University , 1993–2011 the rector of this school, and currently its president. He currently is one of two Polish Academy of Sciences members in management science.
Go to Profile#1764
John Rust
#61991
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
John Philip Rust is an American economist and econometrician. John Rust received his PhD from MIT in 1983 and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University and University of Maryland before joining Georgetown University in 2012. John Rust was awarded Frisch Medal in 1992 and became the fellow of Econometric Society in 1993.
Go to Profile#1765
Allen N. Berger
#88634
Overall Influence
#1766
Lucia A. Reisch
#43311
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lucia A. Reisch is a German behavioural economist and social scientist by training and the El-Erian Professor of Behavioural Economics and Policy at the University of Cambridge since September 2021. Since April 2022 the Professorship is located at the Cambridge Judge Business School. Before joining Cambridge, she was a professor at Copenhagen Business School. She also holds an honorary Leibniz Professorship from Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research in Bremen as well as a Guest Professorship from Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen.
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Giacomo Luciani
#30947
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Giacomo Luciani is a leading Italian expert on the geopolitics of energy often cited in the media. He is primarily known for his seminal contributions to the theory of the rentier state with Egyptian economist Hazem Al Beblawi.
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Laurence Meyer
#49611
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Laurence Meyer is an American economist who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1996 to 2002. Meyer received a B.A. from Yale University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He then taught at Washington University in St. Louis for 27 years.
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Ludovic Phalippou
#34975
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ludovic Phalippou is a French financial economist. He is a Professor of Financial Economics and the Academic Area Head of the Finance, Accounting & Economics group at University of Oxford Saïd Business School. Phalippou specializes in the institutional investor related areas of private equity, including risk management, return benchmarking, legal and governance issues, liquidity and measurement of returns. He is the author of the book, Private Equity Laid Bare, now in its third edition, and host a podcast with the same name.
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Robin Boadway
#61946
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robin William Boadway, is a Canadian economist. He held the David Smith Chair at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Earlier he was Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Economic Theory at Queen's University. He has taught at Queen's University since 1973. He was Head of the Department of Economics at Queen's from 1981–86, and was previously Associate Director of the John Deutsch Institute for the Study of Economic Policy.
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Deborah Freund
#15804
Overall Influence
Deborah Anne Freund is an American university administrator and academic specializing in health economics. She was the president of Claremont Graduate University from 2010 to 2015. Education Freund received a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1973, a Master of Public Health in medical care administration in 1975, a Master of Arts in Applied Economics in 1975, and a PhD in Economics in 1980, the latter three degrees all from the University of Michigan.
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François Ortalo-Magné
#20881
Overall Influence
François Ortalo-Magné is a UK-based European academic. He became the dean of the London Business School in August 2017, succeeding Andrew Likierman. Early life François Ortalo-Magné graduated from the École d'ingénieurs de Purpan, where he earned a master's degree in 1990. He went on to earn a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1995.
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Herbert Mohring
#67685
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Herbert Mohring was a transportation economist who taught at the University of Minnesota from 1961–1994. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, with a thesis on the life insurance industry supervised by Robert Solow.
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Mark J. Perry
#25373
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mark Joseph Perry is an American economist, a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at University of Michigan–Flint, and scholar at The American Enterprise Institute. He is also a member of the Board of Scholars for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
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Marian Czakański
#23736
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marian Czakański is a Polish politician and economist. He briefly served as Minister of Health in the government of Marek Belka . Education He is a 1969 graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics attending the Department of Finance and Statistics.
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William Perraudin
#22632
Overall Influence
William R. M. Perraudin is a British economist. He is an adjunct professor and former Chair of Finance at Imperial College London, specialising in the fields of risk and pricing of debt instruments. He is a director of the risk management software and consultancy firm Risk Control Limited.
Go to Profile#1777
Rachel Griffith
#46995
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Dame Rachel Susan Griffith is a British-American academic and educator. She is professor of economics at the University of Manchester and a research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Griffith was president of the European Economic Association for 2015, making her the first woman to hold the position. She was also joint managing editor of The Economic Journal between 2011 and 2017.
Go to Profile#1778
Robert Roosa
#29562
Overall Influence
1918 - 1993 (75 years)
Robert Vincent Roosa was an American economist and banker. He served as Treasury Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs during the Kennedy administration. He believed the U.S. dollar should be the world's leading currency and reference point because the United States was the leading political and economic power.
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Jean-Marie Chevalier
#74669
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Jean-Marie Chevalier was a French economist. He specialized in energy economics from the 1970s until the 2000s. Biography Chevalier was born in Paris on 4 June 1941 into a family from Creuse. He graduated from Sciences Po in 1962 and earned a doctorate in economics from the Sorbonne.
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Richard Normand Langlois
#52693
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Richard Normand Langlois is an American economist and currently professor at the University of Connecticut. He studied physics and English literature at Williams College, he received a Master's in astronomy from Yale University, and he received his PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford.
Go to Profile#1781
Steven T. Berry
#77755
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Steven Titus Berry is the David Swensen Professor of Economics and the former Director of the Division of Social Sciences at Yale University. He specializes in econometrics and industrial organization. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a winner of the Frisch Medal. In April 2014, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2018, he was named the Jeffrey Talpins Faculty Director of Yale's Tobin Center for Economic Policy.
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Jonathan E. Ingersoll
#16114
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jonathan Edwards "Jon" Ingersoll, Jr. is an American economist. He is the Adrian C. Israel Professor of International Trade and Finance at Yale School of Management. Prior to coming to Yale he was on the faculty at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.
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Christopher Waller
#30470
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Christopher J. Waller is an American economist who is a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2020. A nominee of then-President Donald Trump, he was confirmed by the Senate in December 2020, to serve through January 2030.
Go to Profile#1784
Thomas F. Siems
#38285
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Thomas F. Siems is senior economist and policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He holds a master's degree and PhD from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he also lectures.
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Patrick Bond
#16404
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Patrick Bond is Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. From 2020-21 he was professor at the University of the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-19, distinguished professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance. Before that, from 2004, he was senior professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he directed the Centre for Civil Society. His research interests include political economy, environment, social policy, and geopolitics.
Go to Profile#1786
Alberto Quadrio Curzio
#56400
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Alberto Quadrio Curzio is an Italian economist. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, President Emeritus of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and President of the International Balzan Foundation "Prize".
Go to Profile#1787
Miles Kimball
#63248
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Miles Spencer Kimball is an American economist who is currently the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 1987 to 2016, he was professor of economics and research professor of survey research at the University of Michigan. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economics Research. He is a columnist for the online international business magazine Quartz, where his column coauthored with Noah Smith, "There is one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don't" was the second most popular article in 2013. Other ...
Go to Profile#1788
S. Rao Aiyagari
#74468
Overall Influence
1951 - 1997 (46 years)
Sudhakar Rao Aiyagari was an Indian-born economics professor at the University of Rochester. He had previous been a leading research economist at the Minneapolis Fed, prior to which he had taught, in the 1980s, at New York University, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Emmanuel Haven
#20896
Overall Influence
Emmanuel Haven is an academic, author and researcher. He previously held a personal Chair at the University of Leicester and is currently full professor and the Dr. Alex Faseruk Chair in Financial Management at the Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University.
Go to Profile#1790
Thomas Pugel
#51749
Overall Influence
#1791
Abel Aganbegyan
#14395
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Abel Gezevich Aganbegyan is a leading Soviet and Russian economist of Armenian descent, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctor of business administration of Kingston University, the founder and first editor of the journal EKO.
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Jean-Hervé Lorenzi
#31476
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Hervé Lorenzi is a French economist. Jean-Hervé Lorenzi is President and Chairman of the French think-tank Le Cercle des économistes which annually organizes the economic forum Les Rencontres Economiques d'Aix-en-Provence. He holds the chair "Transition Démographique, Transition Economique" at the Fondation du Risque in partnership with University Paris X. He is president of "Pôle de Compétitivité, Finance et Innovation". He is a member of the executive board of Edmond de Rothschild Group France. As an independent administrator, Jean-hervé Lorenzi is also a member of the supervisory boar...
Go to Profile#1793
Graciela Kaminsky
#62939
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Graciela Kaminsky is a professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kaminsky studied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she received her Ph.D. In 1984 she did a brief research stay at the Argentine Central Bank, later in 1985 she moved to San Diego as an assistant professor at the University of California. In 1992 she worked on the board of governors of the US Federal Reserve System, later in 1998 she was appointed a full professor at George Washington University, where she works at the Elliot School of International Affairs.
Go to Profile#1794
Robert A. Moffitt
#84600
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Allen Moffitt is an American economist; he is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. His areas of research include the economics of tax and transfer programs, especially welfare programs, the analysis of earnings instability in the labor market, the economics of the family, and applied microeconometrics.
Go to Profile#1795
Phillip Swagel
#50028
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Phillip Lee "Phill" Swagel is an American economist who is currently the director of the Congressional Budget Office. As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 2006 to 2009, he played an important role in the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was part of the U.S. government's response to the financial crisis of 2007–08. He was recently a Professor in International Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, and co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center...
Go to Profile#1796
Dambisa Moyo, Baroness Moyo
#45934
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dambisa Felicia Moyo, Baroness Moyo is a Zambian-born economist and author, known for her analysis of macroeconomics and global affairs. She has written five books, including four New York Times bestsellers: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa , How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead , Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World , Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – and How to Fix It , and How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a...
Go to Profile#1797
Carlos Lessa
#31765
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Carlos Francisco Theodoro Machado Ribeiro de Lessa, better known simply as Carlos Lessa was a Brazilian economist and professor. Life and career Born on 30 July 1936, in Rio de Janeiro, to a wealthy family, Lessa studied at private schools in his native city.
Go to Profile#1798
Prakash Loungani
#48188
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Prakash Loungani is a macroeconomist known for his work on the difficulty of forecasting recessions , which has been featured in the Financial Times and The Guardian and on the BBC. He has nudged macroeconomists towards adopting the goal of “inclusive growth” through research on understanding and lowering unemployment ; documenting the impact of austerity on inequality ; and uncovering the role of unfettered capital mobility across national borders in lowering labor’s share of income . His early research focused on understanding the impacts of oil prices on the economy. He is an advisor and senior personnel manager in the International Monetary Fund's Independent Evaluation Office.
Go to Profile#1799
Kathryn L. Shaw
#62564
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kathryn L. Shaw is the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Previously, she was the Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Economics at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. From 1999-2001, she served as a Senate-confirmed Member of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers.
Go to Profile#1800
Christopher J. Cramer
#63499
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christopher J. Cramer is a research chemist and served as vice president for research at the University of Minnesota from 2018–2021. He presently serves as senior vice president and chief research officer for Underwriters Laboratories Inc.
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