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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Economics,
#2151
David Hsieh
#46463
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Arthur Hsieh is a professor of finance at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. He has done extensive research on hedge funds and alternative beta, which includes dynamics of asset prices and their implications for financial risk management and risk and return in hedge funds and commodity funds.
Go to Profile#2152
Lorraine Dearden
#68337
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lorraine Margaret Dearden is an Australo-British economist and professor of economics and social statistics at the Department of Social Science of the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research focuses on the economics of education.
Go to Profile#2153
George Ayittey
#15154
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
George B. N. Ayittey was a Ghanaian economist, author, and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington, D.C. He was a professor at American University, and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Go to Profile#2154
Vincent Crawford
#64955
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vincent P. Crawford is an American economist. He is a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, following his tenure as Drummond Professor of Political Economy from 2010 to 2020. He is also research professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#2155
A. Ronald Gallant
#76567
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
A. Ronald "Ron" Gallant is a leading American econometrician. Gallant is a Professor of Economics and a Liberal Arts Research Professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining the Penn State faculty he was the Hanes Corporation Foundation Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics, Duke University, as well as a Distinguished Scientist in Residence, Department of Economics, New York University, both in the United States.
Go to Profile#2156
Paul Davenport
#33391
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Paul Theodore Davenport, was the tenth president of the University of Alberta and ninth president of the University of Western Ontario. Born and raised in Summit, New Jersey, he graduated magna cum laude from Stanford University in 1969 with a BA in economics. He moved to Canada and earned an MA and Ph.D in economics from the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2157
John F. Kain
#67011
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
John Forrest Kain was an American empirical economist and college professor. He is notable for first hypothesising spatial mismatch theory, whereby he argued that there are insufficient job opportunities in low-income household areas. Kain is also notable for his focus on transport economics, for his long career of teaching at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as for founding the Texas Schools Project.
Go to Profile#2158
Prabhu Pingali
#77166
Overall Influence
Prabhu L. Pingali is a professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and in the division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. He is a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the founding director of the Tata-Cornell Institute. Before becoming a professor at Cornell, Pingali worked in agricultural development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Go to Profile#2159
Keith Chen
#76750
Overall Influence
M. Keith Chen is a Chinese American behavioral economist. As of 2020, he is a tenured professor of economics at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Chen holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University . From 2003 to 2008 he was an assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, and an associate professor there from 2008 until he transferred to UCLA in 2013 as Associate Professor.
Go to Profile#2160
Cui Zhiyuan
#27260
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Cui Zhiyuan , born in Beijing in 1963, is a professor at the School of Public Policy and Management in Tsinghua University, Beijing and a leading member of the Chinese New Left through his work on alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism.
Go to Profile#2161
Solomon Adler
#46225
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Solomon Adler worked as U.S. Treasury representative in China during World War II. Adler was identified by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley as a Soviet spy and resigned from the Treasury Department in 1950. After several years teaching at Cambridge University in England, he returned to China, where he resided from the 1960s to his death, working as a translator and economic advisor.
Go to Profile#2162
Nicolaj Siggelkow
#82910
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nicolaj Siggelkow is an American economist, currently the David M. Knott Professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Early years Siggelkow grew up in Germany before making a move to the United States to pursue his undergraduate degree in economics at Stanford University, where he graduated with distinction and honors in 1993. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1998, Siggelkow joined Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania as faculty.
Go to Profile#2163
Keiichiro Kobayashi
#61143
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
is a Japanese macroeconomist at the Keio University. His areas of expertise are Endogenous Growth Theory, General Equilibrium, Business Cycles, Bad Debt Problem, Debt Control Policy, Macropolitical Economy. He received a Ph.D. in Economics in 1998 from the University of Chicago. His dissertation "The Division of Labor, the Extent of the Market, and Economic Growth" was written under supervision of Robert Lucas, an America's prominent economist and a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics in 1995. Kobayashi was awarded Nikkei Economics Book Award in 2001 and Osaragi Jiro Critics Award in 2002 both fo...
Go to Profile#2164
William A. Darity, Jr.
#44113
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. is an American economist and social sciences researcher. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. His 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance established Darity as the 'founder of stratification economics.' His varied research interests have also included the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African American reparations and the economics of black reparations, and social and economic policies that affect inequities by race and ethnicity.
Go to Profile#2165
Farouk El Okdah
#28235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Farouk Abd El Baky El Okdah was the Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt "CBE" from December 2003 to February 2013. Academic Qualifications - B.S. In Commerce Accounting Major from Ain Shams University 1965
Go to Profile#2166
Patrick Groenen
#72551
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Patrick John Fitzgerald Groenen is a Dutch economist and Professor of Statistics at the Erasmus School of Economics of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, known for his work in the fields of exploratory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling and numerical algorithms in these fields.
Go to Profile#2167
Gordon L. Clark
#70294
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gordon L. Clark, FBA FAcSS is a geographer and academic. He is former Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. with cross appointments in the Saïd Business School and the School of Geography and the Environment. As part of his responsibilities as Director of the Smith School, he is an advisor to companies on issues such as long-term environmental performance. With Towers Watson, he led a team of Oxford academics on a year-long consultation with 25 of the world’s leading investment houses as regards the nature and scope of investment in the context of long-term environmental change.
Go to Profile#2168
David Hulme
#41156
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Hulme is Professor of Development Studies at The University of Manchester where he is Executive Director of the Global Development Institute and CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. Currently, he is the president of the Development Studies Association. He has worked on rural development, poverty and poverty reduction, microfinance, the role of non-government organisations in development, environmental management, social protection and the political economy of global poverty for more than 30 years. His main focus has been on Bangladesh but he has worked extensively across South Asia, East Africa and the Pacific.
Go to Profile#2169
Marvin Goodfriend
#74085
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Marvin Seth Goodfriend was an American economist. He held the Allan H. Meltzer Professorship in economics at Carnegie Mellon University; he was previously the director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Following his 2017 nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the White House decided to forgo renominating Goodfriend at the beginning of the new term.
Go to Profile#2170
Roland Kirstein
#56943
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Roland Kirstein is a German economist and professor of Business Administration at the Otto-von-Guericke-University in Magdeburg, Germany. Biography Roland Kirstein was born Schröder in Bremen, Germany. He studied economics and law at the Saarland University in Germany in 1988-1994. He finished his Ph.D. thesis in 1998 on the topic "Imperfect Decision-Making Judges". As an assistant professor of economics, he specialized in law and economics, namely banking regulation, insurance economics, and constitutional economics.
Go to Profile#2171
Robert Clodius
#81626
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Robert LeRoy Clodius was an American educator and acting President of University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. Born in Walla Walla, Washington, Clodius went to Whitman College. He then served in the United States Navy during World War II and went to officers school at Northwestern University. He then graduated from University of California, Berkeley. He then taught agricultural economics at University of Wisconsin–Madison and was vice president and then acting president in 1970. He retired in 1990. In 2000, Clodius and his wife moved to Rockford, Illinois where he died.
Go to Profile#2172
Walter Adams
#56339
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Walter Adams was an Austrian-born American economist and college professor. He served as the 13th President of Michigan State University and served as an expert witness before 36 congressional committees.
Go to Profile#2173
George Perry
#82476
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
George L. Perry is an American economist, currently a Senior Fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. In 1970, he and Arthur Okun founded the Brookings Panel and its journal, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity . They conceived the Panel as a way to apply rigorous economic research to current economic puzzles, problems and policy issues. After Okun's death in 1980, William Brainard replaced him and Brainard and Perry ran the Panel and edited BPEA until 2007.
Go to Profile#2174
Steinar Strøm
#70208
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Steinar Strøm is a Norwegian economist. He is currently a professor of economics at the University of Turin, researcher at the Frisch Center and a partner and chairman of the board of directors of Vista Analysis. Strøm was Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo from 1976 to 2008. He is noted for his research on microeconometrics and labour economics, as well as energy economics and environmental economics. He is a member of the National Wages Board, appointed by the Norwegian government in 2013. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also affiliated with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research.
Go to Profile#2175
Thorvaldur Gylfason
#74455
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Thorvaldur Gylfason is an Icelandic economist who has been active in Icelandic public life. On 27 November 2010, he was elected to be a delegate at the Icelandic Constitutional Assembly in 2011. He was also chairman of the Iceland Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#2176
Kala Krishna
#79541
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kala Krishna is an Indian -American economist, currently Liberal Arts Research Professor of Economics at Pennsylvania State University., an NBER Research Associate and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. Her research is in the areas of international trade, economics of education, development economics and industrial organization.
Go to Profile#2177
Khieu Samphan
#5298
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Khieu Samphan is a Cambodian former communist politician and economist who was the chairman of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, although Pol Pot remained the General Secretary in the party.
Go to Profile#2178
Tim Lankester
#45000
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir Timothy Patrick Lankester, KCB , is a former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England, and the first economic private secretary to Margaret Thatcher. Lankester is the son of Preb. Robin Prior Archibald Lankester and Jean Dorothy Gilliat. He was educated at Monkton Combe School in Somerset. After undertaking Voluntary Service Overseas in British Honduras , he went up to St John's College, Cambridge , before completing an MA at Yale University.
Go to Profile#2179
Alexander Granberg
#66350
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Alexander Grigorievich Granberg was a Soviet and Russian economist, specialist in the field of regional economics and interregional economic relations, mathematical modeling of economic processes and methodology of intersectoral analysis.
Go to Profile#2180
Steven Klepper
#75691
Overall Influence
1949 - 2013 (64 years)
Steven Irwin Klepper was an American economics professor, researcher and author. Klepper was the Arthur Arton Hamerschlag Professor of Economics and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was recognized for his teaching and research related to the integration of traditional economic models with evolutionary theory, and finding connections between the study of entrepreneurship and mainstream economics. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Klepper authored more than 100 peer reviewed articles generating more than 10,000 citations.
Go to Profile#2181
Edith Kuiper
#86944
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Edith Kuiper is the assistant professor of economics at State University of New York at New Paltz, and she was the president of the International Association for Feminist Economics from 2006 to 2007.
Go to Profile#2182
Ernest Anthony Lowe
#39212
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Ernest Anthony Lowe was a British economist, and Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Sheffield, known for his work on management control, and management control systems.
Go to Profile#2183
Monika Schnitzer
#73150
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Monika Schnitzer is a German economist and chair of comparative economic research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She was the president of the Verein für Socialpolitik from 2015 to 2016 and is the chairwoman of the German Council of Economic Experts since 2022.
Go to Profile#2184
Thandika Mkandawire
#48581
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Thandika Mkandawire was a Malawian economist and public intellectual who was a Chair of African Development and professor of African Development at the London School of Economics. He is a widely published scholar on the social sciences in Africa. His research focused in development theory and economic and social policy.
Go to Profile#2185
Ottón Solís
#32185
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ottón Solís Fallas is a Costa Rican politician. He graduated with a Bachelor of Economics from the University of Costa Rica in 1976 and gained a master's degree in economics from the University of Manchester in 1978. He is currently serving his second term as congressman, was a founding member of the Citizens' Action Party , and ran as its three-time presidential candidate. As an academic, he has taught at several universities in the United States and Costa Rica.
Go to Profile#2186
Michael Knetter
#60576
Overall Influence
Michael Knetter is a past dean of the Wisconsin School of Business. Effective October 16, 2010, Knetter is the new president and chief executive officer of the University of Wisconsin Foundation—the official fundraising arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and received his doctorate from Stanford University. Knetter is widely published in the field of international and macroeconomics. He was a senior staff economist for Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Before becoming the dean of the Wisconsin School Business he worked as a professor and as the associate dean at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#2187
Michael H. Moskow
#35999
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael H. Moskow is currently vice chairman and distinguished fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. From 1994 to 2007, he served as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In that capacity, he was a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve System's most important monetary policy-making body.
Go to Profile#2188
John Ross
#29003
Overall Influence
John Ross is a British economist and blogger, known for his leadership of the Trotskyist party Socialist Action and his support for the Chinese government. He is better known in China as his Chinese name Luo Siyi . Ross currently contributes to multiple Chinese news media including CGTN and China Daily.
Go to Profile#2189
Andreas Kaplan
#7385
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Andreas Marcus Kaplan is president of Kühne Logistics University. He is specialized in the areas of social media, viral marketing, and the digital world in general. Life Kaplan was born on October 5, 1977, and grew up in Munich, Germany. His mother is Anneliese Kaplan and his father is Vincenc Kaplan .
Go to Profile#2190
Judith Sloan
#46983
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Judith Sloan is an Australian economist. Sloan was born in Melbourne. She has been teaching as a university professor at Flinders University and the Curtin Institute of Technology and is an honorary professorial fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research of the University of Melbourne. She served as a commissioner on the Australian government's Productivity Commission and the Australian Fair Pay Commission, and she was deputy chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is a former board director of the Lowy Institute.
Go to Profile#2191
Michael C. Lovell
#88166
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Michael Christopher Lovell is an American economist. He was the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science at Wesleyan University from 1969 to 2002, professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon from 1963 to 1969, and assistant professor of economics at Yale from 1958 to 1963.
Go to Profile#2192
John Graham
#60052
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
John R. Graham is an American financial economist, a professor at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, a research associate for the NBER, and a regular guest commentator on CNBC. A Phi Beta Kappa winner, Graham has accumulated a lengthy list of award winning research papers.
Go to Profile#2193
Michele Bullock
#27945
Overall Influence
Michele Bullock is an Australian economist who is currently governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia . She commenced as governor on 18 September 2023, and is the first woman to hold the role. Early life, personal life and education Bullock was born in 1962 or 1963 in Melbourne. At approximately nine years of age, she moved to Armidale, New South Wales, where she attended Armidale High School.
Go to Profile#2194
Michael A. Lebowitz
#54458
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Michael A. Lebowitz was a Marxist economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Early life He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 27 November 1937 to Louis Lebowitz and Dora Lebowitz . Ten years later, his family moved to Passaic, New Jersey, where he completed public school in 1955. He studied economics and marketing at the New York University School of Commerce at night while working days at Federal Pioneer Electric as a statistical clerk and then market research analyst. Graduating cum laude with a BS in 1960, he went on to do graduate work...
Go to Profile#2195
Paul Sultan
#66089
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Paul Sultan was a labour economist, born in 1924 in Vancouver, Canada, died in 2019 Edwardsville, Illinois Education After serving as an aircraft pilot during World War II for the Royal Canadian Air Force, he pursued an academic career at Cornell University, the University at Buffalo, Claremont Graduate School in California, UCLA, Simon Fraser University and the University of Southern Illinois.
Go to Profile#2196
J. Mark Ramseyer
#22842
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Mark Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is the author of over 10 books and 50 articles in scholarly journals. He is co-author of one of the leading corporations casebooks, Klein, Ramseyer & Bainbridge, Business Associations, Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Corporations, now in its 10th edition. In 2018 he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of "his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding tow...
Go to Profile#2197
Lawrence A. Boland
#104860
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Lawrence Arthur Boland is a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University. Boland is critical of the neoclassical research program. He has attempted to draw out the unstated assumptions of neoclassical economics and submit them to methodological scrutiny. His key criticisms of traditional economics center on the problem of induction, methodological individualism, and the acquisition of knowledge.
Go to Profile#2198
Thomas Borcherding
#72300
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Thomas Earl Borcherding was an American economist. His areas of specialization include microeconomics, public choice, property rights, exchange and transaction costs, politics and public choice, sociological economics, and the role of institutions in economic, political, and social choice.
Go to Profile#2199
Małgorzata Zaleska
#84848
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Małgorzata Zaleska is a Polish economist who is currently a professor of economic sciences, the chairman of the committee on finance of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the director of the Institute of Banking at the Warsaw School of Economics. She served as the president of the Warsaw Stock Exchange , after serving as the member of the board of the National Bank of Poland and the president of the Bank Guarantee Fund in Poland .
Go to Profile#2200
Russell Leigh Smyth
#104948
Overall Influence
