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,
#2251
Nathalie Elgrably-Lévy
#63713
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nathalie Elgrably-Lévy is an economics teacher and a writer. She holds an M.Sc. in Commerce from HEC Montréal, with a specialization in applied Economics and a thesis on the federal budget deficit. Elgrably-Lévy is primarily interested by the evaluation of public policy.
Go to Profile#2252
Warren Coats
#56913
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Warren L. Coats, Jr. , is an economist specializing in monetary policy. He retired from the International Monetary Fund in May 2003 to join the board of directors of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. He is president of Economic Consulting, providing technical assistance to central banks, and until recently was adviser to the central banks of Afghanistan and Kazakhstan .
Go to Profile#2253
Lawrence Haddad
#47355
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Lawrence James Haddad , is a British economist whose main research focuses on how to make food systems work better to advance the nutrition status of people globally. He is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.
Go to Profile#2254
Thomas Vietorisz
#59839
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Thomas Adam Vietorisz was a Hungarian-born American economist who specialized in urban planning. Education Vietorisz completed his undergraduate studies at Budapest, Basel, and Zurich. In 1948, he received a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering and in 1956, a doctorate degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#2255
A. K. Shiva Kumar
#35556
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
A. K. Shiva Kumar , is a development economist, policy advisor, and evaluator, who has over the past 40 years, taught economics, undertaken evaluations, conducted research and policy analysis, worked closely with governments, international agencies, and civil society organisations to advocate for changes in public policy and legislation. He teaches various courses at Harvard University, Indian School of Business, BITS School of Management, Young India Fellowship, S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research and Ashoka University. He is a board member of the Global Partnership to End Violenc...
Go to Profile#2256
Matthew Watson
#41155
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Matthew Watson is a professor of political economy and international political economy in University of Warwick's Department of Politics and International Studies. His work in the area of IPE has been published widely; he has solely authored three books, and had around thirty articles published in peer reviewed academic journals on a wide range of issues in political economy and IPE. His three books are Foundations of International Political Economy , Political Economy of International Capital Mobility , and Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World . Between 2001 and 2007, Wats...
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Nelson Barbosa
#78713
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Nelson Henrique Barbosa Filho is a Brazilian economist and professor of economics. From 21 December 2015 to 12 May 2016, he was Brazil's Minister of Finance. Barbosa holds a full professorship at the São Paulo School of Economics of the Getulio Vargas Foundation and is adjunct professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as well as Researcher at IBRE/FGV and a member of the boards of Cetip and Regional Bank of Brasilia .
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Manfred Kirchgeorg
#47467
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Manfred Kirchgeorg is a German economist, specialized in the field of marketing management, who holds the SVI-Endowed Chair of Marketing, especially E-Commerce and Cross-Media Management at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management.
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Sylvia Ann Hewlett
#23783
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a Cambridge educated economist. Education Hewlett graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, was a Kennedy Scholar and then earned her PhD degree in economics at the University of London.
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Christopher S. Tang
#61391
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Tang is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Edward W. Carter chair in business administration at its Anderson School of Management. Elected as an INFORMS fellow in 2011, Fellow of the Production and Operations Society in 2011, and Fellow of the MSOM Society in 2015. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of M&SOM between 2015-2020. From 2002 to 2004 he was dean of the business school of the National University of Singapore.
Go to Profile#2261
Lee Badgett
#83670
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mary Virginia Lee Badgett is an American economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, best known for her research into economic issues relevant to lesbians, gay men, and their families. Badgett earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990. From 1990 to 1997 she was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1997 she joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2005 Badgett has also been the research director at...
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John E. Floyd
#54540
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
John E. Floyd is a Canadian economist and member of the University of Toronto faculty. Biography Floyd received his B.Comm. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1958, and continued to obtain an honours economics degree in 1959. He later obtained M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962 and 1964 respectively.
Go to Profile#2263
Hans Brems
#103269
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Hans Julius Brems was a Danish American economist. He was known for his contributions in mathematical economics, especially quantitative model-building. Born in Viborg, Denmark, Brems earned his doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. Moving to the United States, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1954. Although most of his later work was in macro-economics, his most original contribution was by including quality competition in the Theory of Monopolistic Competition.
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John Pencavel
#76933
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John H. Pencavel is a British economist and academic, currently serving as Levin Professor of Economics at Stanford University, having been at the institution since 1969. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society , Fellow of University College London , Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists , and Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
Go to Profile#2265
Werner Güth
#107935
Overall Influence
#2266
Anita Nyberg
#51287
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anita Nyberg is a Swedish professor emerita in Gender Perspectives in Work and Economics at the Centre for Gender Studies at Stockholm University. She was Secretary of the Swedish Committee on the Distribution of Economic Power and Economic Resources between Women and Men .
Go to Profile#2267
Robert Gibbons
#51778
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert S. Gibbons is an American economist, currently the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He launched the Working Group on Organizational Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2002, and was its director until 2022.
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Birgit Grodal
#67415
Overall Influence
1943 - 2004 (61 years)
Birgit Grodal , was an economics professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1968 until her death in 2004. Early life Birgit Grodal was born on 24 June 1943 in Copenhagen, Denmark. She grew up in Frederiksberg. She was the middle child having both a younger and an older brother. Grodal was interested in mathematics from a young age and used to fill the pages of her psalm book with equations. She was married to Torben Grodal.
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Carl Christ
#90217
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Carl Finley Christ was an American economist and a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for his contributions in econometrics, including an early popular textbook.
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Martha Bailey
#87284
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Martha J. Bailey is a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. She was previously a professor of economics at the University of Michigan from 2007 to 2020, where she was the first woman internally promoted to tenure in that department. In November 2017, Bloomberg Businessweek named her someone to watch in 2018, because "Her research on the positive economic effects of contraception has influenced debates around h...
Go to Profile#2271
Timothy J. Bartik
#57747
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Timothy J. Bartik is an American economist who specializes in regional economics, public finance, urban economics, labor economics, and labor demand policies. He is a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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Arturo Porzecanski
#65816
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Arturo C. Porzecanski is a Uruguayan-born economist who has spent his entire adult life in the United States. Early life Born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay, of European Jewish immigrant parents, Porzecanski came to the United States in early 1968 and earned his B.A. degree in economics at Whittier College and then his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pittsburgh .
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Ugo Pagano
#75964
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ugo Pagano is an Italian economist and Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Siena where he is also Director of the PhD programme in Economics and President of S. Chiara Graduate School.
Go to Profile#2274
Cosmin Marinescu
#82657
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Cosmin-Ștefan Marinescu is a Romanian economist and professor of economics at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies. On 22 December 2014, he was appointed Presidential Advisor on Economic and Social Policy to the President of Romania. Previously, he served as Advisor to the Romanian Minister of Economy, Trade and Business Environment , and the Advisor to the Romanian Minister of Public Finance . He is also the founder of the Centre for Economics and Liberty - ECOL, a Romanian non-profit educational and research initiative aiming to promote the principles of democracy and economic freedom.
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Yuba Raj Khatiwada
#79403
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Yuba Raj Khatiwada is a former Nepali politician and economist who has served as the Ambassador of Nepal to the United States since 17 February 2021. As the residential ambassador of Nepal to the US, he was also the non-residential ambassador to Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and was entitled to look after the affairs related to the World Bank, IMF, and the World Bank Group . He was a member of the National Assembly from 2018 to 2020 and was a minister in the cabinet of KP Sharma Oli from February 2018 to September 2020. He previously served as the governor o...
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Abul Barkat
#36294
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Abul Barkat is a Bangladeshi economist and a professor in the Department of Economics, University of Dhaka. In addition to his teaching, from 2009 to 2014 he was the former chairman of Janata Bank Ltd. He is the present elected president of the Bangladesh Economic Association. He is a freedom fighter.
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Calestous Juma
#21781
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Calestous Juma was a Kenyan scientist and academic, specializing in sustainable development. He was named one of the most influential 100 Africans in 2012, 2013 and 2014 by the New African magazine. He was Professor of the Practice of International Development and Faculty Chair of the Innovation for Economic Development Executive Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Juma was Director of the School's Science, Technology and Globalization Project at Harvard Kennedy School as well as the Agricultural Innovation in Africa Project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His last book, Inno...
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Peter Mandelson
#12839
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Benjamin Mandelson, Baron Mandelson is a British Labour Party politician who served as First Secretary of State from 2009 to 2010. He was President of the Board of Trade in 1998 and from 2008 to 2010. He is the president of international think tank Policy Network, honorary president of the Great Britain–China Centre, and chairman of strategic advisory firm Global Counsel. Mandelson is often referred to as a Blairite.
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Gillian Hadfield
#74319
Overall Influence
Gillian Kereldena Hadfield is a professor of law and of strategic management who is the inaugural Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is also director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Previously, she was the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. At USC, Hadfield directed the Southern California Innovation Project and the USC Center in Law, Economics, and Organization. She is a former member of the board of directo...
Go to Profile#2280
Joop Hartog
#75572
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
"Joop" Hartog is a Dutch economist and an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. He ranks among the most important Dutch labour economists and was elected to be a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. The Joop Hartog Dissertation Prize, a bi-annual prize for the best Ph.D. thesis defended at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Economics and Business, is named after Hartog.
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Shlomo Yitzhaki
#100608
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Shlomo Yitzhaki was an Israeli economist and the Sam M. Cohodas Professor Emeritus of Agricultural economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2002 to 2012 he served as the chief statistician and director of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.
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Alison Preston
#84014
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alison Preston is an Australian economist, Winthrop Professor of Economics at the University of Western Australia, and Deputy Dean of UWA Business School. She is an expert on wage determination and wages policy, the gender pay gap and segmentation and labour market structures.
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Lucian Croitoru
#33664
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Lucian Croitoru is a Romanian economist. On October 15, 2009, following the defeat of Emil Boc's government through a motion of no confidence, President Traian Băsescu nominated Croitoru to be Prime Minister of Romania. The nomination was opposed by a majority of Parliament, which adopted a declaration asking for his withdrawal, and vowing support for the candidature of Klaus Iohannis. Croitoru assembled a proposed cabinet, but this was voted down by Parliament on November 4.
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Pontus Braunerhjelm
#67489
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pontus Braunerhjelm is a Swedish economist who works as a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology , where he is head of the Department of Industrial Economics and Management. He has previously been Secretary General of the Swedish government Globalization Council and until 2014 CEO of the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum.
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C. Eugene Steuerle
#48583
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
C. Eugene "Gene" Steuerle is an American economist, a Richard B. Fisher chair and Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and a columnist under the title The Government We Deserve.
Go to Profile#2286
Carlos A. Vegh
#78289
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Carlos A. Végh is a Uruguayan academic economist who, since 2013, is the Fred H. Sanderson Professor of International Economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies , and holds a joint appointment with Johns Hopkins' Department of Economics. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1998. He was the World Bank's chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean from February 1, 2017 to June 30, 2019, while on leave from Johns Hopkins. He was previously a professor of economics and vice-chair of undergraduate studies at UCLA and professor of economics at the University of Maryland .
Go to Profile#2287
Earl Grinols
#72453
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Earl Grinols is an American economist, political scientist, and author, currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Economics at Baylor University. Biography Grinols was born in Bemidji, Minnesota, and attended the University of Michigan for undergraduate study, and then the University of Minnesota, receiving degrees from the latter in economics and mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.
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John Hoddinott
#105559
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
John Hoddinott , is a Canadian economist and the Howard Edward Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell University. In 2002–2015, Hoddinott was a Deputy Division Director at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Since 1997, he has been a research associate at the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. Hoddinott received his DPhil in 1989 from Oxford University.
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Johann Eekhoff
#88536
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Johann Eekhoff was a German economist and former state secretary of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. He held a chair for economic policy at the University of Cologne until 2009. A native of Moormerland, East Frisia, Eekhoff studied economics at the Saarland University, Philadelphia University, and Ruhr University Bochum. He earned his Ph.D. from Ruhr University Bochum in 1971, and his Habilitation from Saarland University in 1979. Between 1991 and 1993 he served as state secretary under Federal Ministers Jürgen Möllemann and Günter Rexrodt.
Go to Profile#2290
Meghnad Desai, Baron Desai
#71483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai is an Indian-born naturalised British economist and former Labour politician. He stood unsuccessfully for the position of Lord Speaker in the House of Lords in 2011. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in 2008. He is a Professor Emeritus of the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#2291
Andrés Velasco
#62134
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrés Velasco Brañes is a Chilean economist and professor who served as Minister of Finance in the first government of President Michelle Bachelet from March 2006 to March 2010. He is currently the Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics.
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Mauro Bonaiuti
#58008
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mauro Bonaiuti, PhD, teaches Ecological economics on the Master's on Socio-Environmental Sustainability and Solidarity Economy and Sustainability programme at the University of Turin. He is co-founder of the Italian Degrowth Association and among the promoters of the Italian Solidarity Economy Network.
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Ton Vorst
#66580
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Antonius Cornelis Franciscus Vorst is a Dutch financial engineer and mathematician, Professor at the department of Finance of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and Director of the VU Amsterdam School of Finance and Risk Management.
Go to Profile#2294
Jean‐charles Rochet
#108673
Overall Influence
#2295
Stephen Kinsella
#69107
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Stephen Kinsella is an Irish economist. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Limerick's Kemmy Business School in Ireland and a columnist with TheCurrency.News and was previously a columnist for the Sunday Business Post and the Irish Independent. He has written a number of books about the Irish economy. He is associated with the Post Keynesian school of economic thought in general and the development of stock flow consistent models in particular. He co-hosts a podcast Ann & Steve Talk Stuff, with Ann Blake.
Go to Profile#2296
Roberto Alemann
#21303
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Roberto Alemann was an Argentine lawyer, economist, publisher, and academic. Twice Minister of Economy, he was also the Argentine ambassador to the United States and director of the traditional Argentine-German newspaper Argentinisches Tageblatt.
Go to Profile#2297
Xia Yeliang
#52316
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Xia Yeliang is a former associate professor of economics at Peking University. He was one of the early drafters and signers of Charter 08 in 2008. In June 2013, he was given notice by a Communist party official at the School of Economics that a faculty vote regarding termination of his position at the university was scheduled. He was dismissed in October 2013. PKU issued an announcement afterwards, claiming "In recent years, Xia's teaching evaluations has been consistently the lowest of the whole School of Economics. The school has received more than 340 student complaints since 2006. The hiring and promotion committee voted against the renewal of his contract on Oct 26, 2012.
Go to Profile#2298
Karl A. Fox
#74637
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Karl August Fox was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Iowa State University from 1955 to 1987. During 1954–55, he was senior staff economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In 1961 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#2299
Pasuk Phongpaichit
#19544
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pasuk Phongpaichit is a Thai economist. A professor at Chulalongkorn University, she is the author of several books on corruption in Thailand. Pasuk earned BA and MA degrees in economics at Monash University in Australia, and received her PhD at Cambridge University in England. Her books include A History of Thailand, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, and Thailand's Crisis , and Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja .
Go to Profile#2300
Bhabatosh Datta
#45412
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Bhabatosh Datta was a noted Indian economist, academic and writer. He taught at Chittagong College and later became Professor of Economics, Presidency College, Kolkata, where he later Emeritus Professor.
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