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,
#201
Mason Gaffney
#6818
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Merrill Mason Gaffney was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' sk...
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Jan Kregel
#7527
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jan A. Kregel is an American post-Keynesian economist. Kregel has served since 2006 as Professor of Finance and Development at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS , whose Bologna Center he co-directed in the late 1980s, and a visiting professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He is also one of the Senior Scholars at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Until 2007, he was Chief of the Policy Analysis and Development Branch of the Financing for Development Office of United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
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Roger Garrison
#6425
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Roger Wayne Garrison is an American professor of economics at Auburn University, and an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of the book Time and Money, which presents a graphical framework for capital-based macroeconomics and analyzes the effects of monetary policy on capital markets. It also offers a critique of Keynesian macroeconomic analysis. Garrison received an electrical engineering degree in 1967 from the University of Missouri–Rolla and a master's degree in economics from the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1974. Garrison received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 1981.
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Peter Boettke
#3843
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Peter Joseph Boettke is an American economist of the Austrian School. He is currently a professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University; the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, vice president for research, and director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at GMU.
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Russ Roberts
#3898
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Russell David "Russ" Roberts is an American economist. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.
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Mark Blaug
#5402
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Mark Blaug FBA was a Dutch-born British economist , who covered a broad range of topics during his long career. He was married to Ruth Towse. Life and work Blaug was born on 3 April 1927 in The Hague as Norbert Blauaug. In 1955 Blaug received his PhD from Columbia University in New York under the supervision of George Stigler. Besides shorter periods in public service and in international organisations he has held academic appointments in – among others – Yale University, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham. He wa...
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Tony Lawson
#3093
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tony Lawson is a British philosopher and economist. He is professor of economics and philosophy in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, a former director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and co-founder of the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Lawson is noted for his contributions to heterodox economics and to philosophical issues in social theorising, most especially to social ontology.
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Sanford J. Grossman
#4267
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sanford "Sandy" Jay Grossman is an American economist and hedge fund manager specializing in quantitative finance. Grossman’s research has spanned the analysis of information in securities markets, corporate structure, property rights, and optimal dynamic risk management. He has published widely in leading economic and business journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Econometrica, and Journal of Finance. His research in macroeconomics, finance, and risk management has earned numerous awards. Grossman is currently Chairman and CEO of QFS Asset Management, an affiliate of which he founded in 1988.
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K. N. Raj
#5328
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Kakkadan Nandanath Rajan was an Indian economist. He is popularly known as K. N. Raj. He played an important role in India's planned development, drafting sections of India's first Five Year Plan, specifically the introductory chapter when he was only 26 years old. He was a veteran economist in the Planning Commission. He worked out a plan to raise India's rate of savings in the post-Second World War period when the country was in need of foreign aid. He computed India's Balance of Payments for the first time for the Reserve Bank of India. Raj was an advisor to several prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to P.V.
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Stephen Resnick
#4009
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
Stephen Alvin Resnick was an American Marxist economist. He was well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis. His work, along with that of Wolff, is especially associated with a post-Althusserian perspective on political economy.
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Takashi Negishi
#7030
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Takashi Negishi is a Japanese neo-Walrasian economist. Career Negishi graduated Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo in 1956 and received a PhD in Economics from University of Tokyo in 1963. Contributions Negishi's research has provided a wide range of extensions to orthodox general equilibrium modelling. These additions have typically involved imperfect competition, stability and unemployment.
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Nancy Stokey
#7038
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Laura Stokey has been the Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago since 1990 and focuses particularly on mathematical economics while recently conducting research about Growth Theory, economic dynamics, and fiscal/monetary policy. She earned her BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1978, under the direction of thesis advisor Kenneth Arrow. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She prev...
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Peter Temin
#2588
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter Temin is an economist and economic historian, currently Gray Professor Emeritus of Economics, MIT and former head of the Economics Department. Education Temin graduated from Swarthmore College in 1959 before earning his Ph.D. at MIT in 1964. Beginning in the 1960s and early 1970s he published on American economic history in the 19th century, including The Jacksonian Economy and Causal Factors in American Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century , as well as Reckoning with Slavery , which was an examination of the slave economy and its effects. His papers of the 1960s would reflect in...
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Tony Atkinson
#3800
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Sir Anthony Barnes Atkinson was a British economist, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and senior research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. A student of James Meade, Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies. He worked on inequality and poverty for over four decades.
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Arvind Subramanian
#2939
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Arvind Subramanian is an Indian economist and the former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, having served from 16 October 2014 to 20 June 2018. Subramanian is currently a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He previously served as Professor of Economics at Ashoka University and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development.
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Kaushik Basu
#1974
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kaushik Basu is an economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and academic advisory board member of upcoming Plaksha University. He began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Kaushik Basu is winner of t...
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Geoffrey Hodgson
#3917
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Geoffrey Martin Hodgson is Emeritus Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics. Hodgson is recognised as one of the leading figures of modern critical institutionalism which carries forth the critical spirit and intellectual tradition of the founders of institutional economics, particularly that of Thorstein Veblen. His broad research interests span from evolutionary economics and history of economic thought to Marxism and theoretical biology. He first became known for his book Economics and ...
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Alvin E. Roth
#2752
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017.
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David Laibson
#6448
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David Isaac Laibson is a professor of economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1994. His research focuses on macroeconomics, intertemporal choice, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. In 2016, he became chairman of the Harvard economics department.
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Kristalina Georgieva
#1084
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva-Kinova is a Bulgarian economist serving as the 12th managing director of the International Monetary Fund since 2019. She was the Chief Executive of the World Bank Group from 2017 to 2019 and served as Acting President of the World Bank Group from 1 February to 8 April 2019 following the resignation of Jim Yong Kim. She previously served as Vice-President of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2016.
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Steven Horwitz
#6764
Overall Influence
1964 - 2021 (57 years)
Steven G. Horwitz was an American economist of the Austrian School. Horwitz was the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the department of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2017, he retired as the Dana Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Lawrence University.
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James K. Galbraith
#3371
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
James Kenneth Galbraith is an American economist. He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and part of the executive committee of the World Economics Association, created in 2011.
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Andrew Kliman
#2654
Overall Influence
Andrew Kliman is an American economist and professor of Economics. He is the author of several publications on Marxian economics. His book Reclaiming Marx's "Capital" defends the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Karl Marx's value theory against claims of inconsistency from neoclassical, neo-Ricardian, and other economists.
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Alberto Alesina
#3133
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Alberto Francesco Alesina was an Italian political economist. Considered one of the most cited supporters of austerity policies in the 2000s, he wrote about economics and political science. Background and professional life Alesina was born in Broni, Lombardy, Italy. He obtained his undergraduate degree in economics from Bocconi University.
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Armin Falk
#3629
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Armin Falk is a German economist. He has held a chair at the University of Bonn since 2003. Biography Education and career Falk studied economics as well as philosophy and history at the University of Cologne. In 1998 he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich under the supervision of Ernst Fehr.
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Herbert Scarf
#4573
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Herbert Eli "Herb" Scarf was an American mathematical economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. Education and career Scarf was born in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Lene and Louis Scarf. During his undergraduate work he finished in the top 10 of the 1950 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the major mathematics competition between universities across the United States and Canada. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954, supervised by Salomon Bochner.
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Kevin M. Murphy
#4711
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kevin Miles Murphy is the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 1997 Murphy was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association, given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of forty, and widely considered to be the second most prestigious prize in economics . Murphy was cited for his study of the causes of growing income inequality between white-collar and blue-collar workers in the United ...
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Steven Levitt
#1729
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Steven David Levitt is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels . Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007.
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Jeffrey M. Perloff
#8928
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeffrey M. Perloff is an American economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most noted for his textbooks on Industrial Organization, jointly written with Dennis Carlton, and Microeconomics.
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John Forbes Nash Jr.
#700
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
John Forbes Nash, Jr. , known and published as John Nash, was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten were awarded the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. In 2015, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to the field of partial differential equations.
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Julie A. Nelson
#7130
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#232
Charles Plott
#5275
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Charles Raymond Plott is an American economist. He currently is Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science at the California Institute of Technology, Director, Laboratory for Experimental Economics and Political Science, and a pioneer in the field of experimental economics. His research is focused on the basic principles of process performance and the use of those principles in the design of new, decentralized processes to solve complex problems. Applications are found in mechanisms for allocating complex items such as the markets for pollution permits in Southern Calif...
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Richard Easterlin
#5176
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Richard Ainley Easterlin is a professor of economics at the University of Southern California. He is best known for the economic theory named after him, the Easterlin paradox. Another of his contributions is the Easterlin hypothesis about long waves of baby booms and busts.
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George Gilder
#2529
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Franklin Gilder is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty, advanced a case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration. He is the chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC.
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Gita Gopinath
#6432
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist who has served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund , since 21 January 2022. She had previously served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022.
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Gregory Chow
#7081
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Gregory Chi-Chong Chow is a Chinese-American economist at Princeton University and Xiamen University. The Chow test, commonly used in econometrics to test for structural breaks, was invented by him. He has also been influential in the economic policy of China, including being an adviser for the Economic Planning and Development Council of the Executive Yuan in Taiwan, and being an adviser for the Chinese State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System on economic reform.
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Alan Krueger
#3838
Overall Influence
1960 - 2019 (59 years)
Alan Bennett Krueger was an American economist who was the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, nominated by President Barack Obama, from May 2009 to October 2010, when he returned to Princeton. He was nominated in 2011 by Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and served in that office from November 2011 to August 2013.
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James M. Poterba
#7409
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
James Michael "Jim" Poterba, FBA is an American economist, Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and current NBER president and chief executive officer. Early years Poterba was born in New York City. He attended Pennsbury High School in Pennsylvania, where he won the 1976 championship of the National Forensic League in policy debate. He completed his A.B., summa cum laude, in 1980 from Harvard University and completed his PhD in 1983 from Nuffield College, Oxford. He was a Marshall Scholar.
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Rudi Dornbusch
#5912
Overall Influence
1942 - 2002 (60 years)
Rüdiger Dornbusch was a German economist who worked in the United States for most of his career. Early life and education Dornbusch was born in Krefeld in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his secondary education at the Gymnasium am Moltkeplatz in Krefeld, he went to study abroad. He received his Licence en Sciences Politiques from the University of Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies in 1966, where he also stayed on for a year as an assistant in economics. He subsequently moved to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the Univers...
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Damodar N. Gujarati
#8256
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Damodar N. Gujarati is a professor of economics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and author/co-author of the Basic Econometrics textbook, among others. The textbook has been published in 5 editions over the last 21 years, and translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, and Persian.
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Carmen Reinhart
#3318
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carmen M. Reinhart is a Cuban-American economist and the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is als...
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Michael Rothschild
#5408
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Rothschild is an American economist; he is visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California in Los Angeles and a former dean at Princeton. Education Rothschild holds a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Reed College , and a Master of Arts in international relations from Yale University . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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Ernest Mandel
#1163
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Ernest Ezra Mandel Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university.
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Orley Ashenfelter
#9555
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Orley Clark Ashenfelter is an American economist and the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. His areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics. He was influential in contributing to the applied turn in economics.
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Charles Horioka
#9932
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Charles Yuji Horioka is a Japanese-American economist residing in Japan. Horioka received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and is currently professor at the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. He is concurrently distinguished research professor and director at the Asian Growth Research Institute and invited professor and professor emeritus at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University . Previously, he taught at Stanford, Columbia, Kyoto, and Osaka Universities and the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he was Vea Family Professor of Technology and Evolutionary Economics Centennial.
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Richard R. Nelson
#6592
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Richard R. Nelson is an American professor of economics at Columbia University. He is one of the leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics thanks to his seminal book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change written jointly with Sidney G. Winter. He is also known for his work on industry, economic growth, the theory of the firm, and technical change.
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Charles P. Kindleberger
#3579
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Charles Poor Kindleberger was an American economic historian and author of over 30 books. His 1978 book Manias, Panics, and Crashes, about speculative stock market bubbles, was reprinted in 2000 after the dot-com bubble. He is well known for his role in developing what would become hegemonic stability theory, arguing that a hegemonic power was needed to maintain a stable international monetary system. He has been referred to as "the master of the genre" on financial crisis by The Economist.
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Jerry A. Hausman
#10073
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jerry Allen Hausman is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a notable econometrician. He has published numerous influential papers in microeconometrics. Hausman is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the John Bates Clark Medal in 1985 and the Frisch Medal in 1980.
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Luigi Zingales
#3060
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Luigi Zingales is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of two widely-reviewed books. His book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists is a study of "relationship capitalism". In A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity , Zingales "suggests that channeling populist anger can reinvigorate the power of competition and reverse the movement toward a 'crony system'."
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Robert B. Wilson
#2757
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Butler "Bob" Wilson, Jr. is an American economist and the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford University. He was jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with his Stanford colleague and former student Paul R. Milgrom, "for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats". Two more of his students, Alvin E. Roth and Bengt Holmström, are also Nobel Laureates in their own right.
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