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,
#251
Herbert Gintis
#2830
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Herbert Gintis was an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture coevolution, efficiency wages, strong reciprocity, and human capital theory. Throughout his career, he worked extensively with economist Samuel Bowles. Their landmark book, Schooling in Capitalist America, had multiple editions in five languages since it was first published in 1976. Their book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution was published by Princeton University Pr...
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Kenneth E. Boulding
#3079
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. Boulding was the author of two citation classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory . He was co-founder of general systems theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to sociologist Elise M. Boulding.
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John A. List
#3846
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
John August List is an American economist known for establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. He works at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor; from 2012 until 2018, he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics. Since 2016, he has served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. List is noted for his pioneering contributions to field experiments in economics, with Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof and noted law profe...
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Herman Wold
#5367
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Herman Ole Andreas Wold was a Norwegian-born econometrician and statistician who had a long career in Sweden. Wold was known for his work in mathematical economics, in time series analysis, and in econometric statistics.
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Pranab Bardhan
#3984
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Pranab Bardhan is an Indian economist who has taught and worked in the United States since 1979. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography Bardhan received his bachelor's degree at Presidency College, Kolkata in 1958, his master's at University of Calcutta in 1960, and his doctorate at Cambridge University in 1966 with a dissertation entitled Economic Growth and the Pattern of International Trade and Investment: A Study in Pure Theory. He taught at the University of Calcutta , MIT , Indian Statistical Institute , the Delhi School of Economics of the University of Delhi and joined the Berkeley economics department in 1977.
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Jean-Claude Trichet
#1263
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean-Claude Trichet is a French economist who served as President of the European Central Bank from 2003 to 2011. Previous to his assumption of the presidency he served as Governor of the Bank of France from 1993 to 2003.
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Burton Malkiel
#3045
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Burton Gordon Malkiel is an American economist, financial executive, and writer most noted for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street . Malkiel is the Chemical Bank chairman's professor of economics at Princeton University, and is a two-time chairman of the economics department there. He served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers , president of the American Finance Association , and dean of the Yale School of Management . He also spent 28 years as a director of the Vanguard Group. He currently serves as Chief Investment Officer to software-based financial advisor, Wealthfront Inc.
Go to Profile#258
Samuel Bowles
#5387
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#259
John Komlos
#4126
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Komlos is an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the chair of economic history at the University of Munich. Personal life Komlos was born in 1944 in Budapest in Hungary during the Holocaust. After becoming refugees during the 1956 revolution, his family fled to the United States where Komlos finally grew up in Chicago.
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Richard Clarida
#6286
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard Harris Clarida is an American economist who served as the 21st Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2018 to 2022. Clarida resigned his post on January 14, 2022, to return from public service leave to teach at Columbia University for the spring term of 2022. He is the C. Lowell Harriss Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University and, from 2006 until September 2018, Global Strategic Advisor for PIMCO. He is notable for his contributions to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory and international monetary economics. He is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and is a recipient of the Treasury Medal.
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Robert Summers
#5730
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Robert Summers was an American economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1960. A widely cited early work by Summers is on the small-sample statistical properties of alternate regression estimators where analytical measures are unavailable.
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Wynne Godley
#9067
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Wynne Godley was an economist famous for his pessimism about the British economy and his criticism of the British government. In 2007, he and Marc Lavoie wrote a book about the "Stock-Flow Consistent" model, an analysis that predicted the global financial crisis of 2008. Dirk Bezemer argues that Godley was notable for predicting the nature of the Great Recession of the late 2000s well in advance, and for doing so on the basis of a formal model.
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Axel A. Weber
#5181
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Axel Alfred Weber is a German economist, professor, and banker. He is currently a board member and chairman of Swiss investment bank and financial services company, UBS Group AG, and has announced his resignation effective 7 April 2022.
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Joel Mokyr
#3213
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#265
Michael Todaro
#7070
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Paul Todaro is an American economist and a pioneer in the field of development economics. Todaro earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968 for a thesis titled The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply. Todaro was Professor of Economics at New York University for eighteen years and Senior Associate at the Population Council for thirty years. He lived and taught in Africa for six years. He appears in Who's Who in Economics and Economists of the Twentieth Century. He is also the author of eight books and more than fifty professional articles.
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Jeremy Siegel
#4007
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeremy James Siegel is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Siegel comments extensively on the economy and financial markets. He appears regularly on networks including CNN, CNBC and NPR, and writes regular columns for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Yahoo! Finance. Siegel's paradox is named after him.
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Richard M. Goodwin
#5822
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Richard M. Goodwin was an American mathematician and economist. Background Goodwin was born in New Castle, Indiana. He received his BA and PhD at Harvard and taught there from 1942 until 1950. He fled the United States during the McCarthy era, then taught at the University of Cambridge until 1979 and the University of Siena until 1984. Although he became a university lecturer in the Cambridge faculty of economics and politics in 1951, it was not until five years later that he agreed to join the fellowship of a college, choosing that of Peterhouse. Christopher Calladine thinks that this unusua...
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William A. Niskanen
#4505
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
William Arthur Niskanen was an American economist. He was one of the architects of President Ronald Reagan's economic program and contributed to public choice theory. He was also a long-time chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.
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Dale W. Jorgenson
#7603
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, teaching in the department of economics and John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as chairman of the department of economics from 1994 to 1997.
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Scott Sumner
#4456
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
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Jack Hirshleifer
#6655
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Jack Hirshleifer was an American economist and long-time professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a B.S. from Harvard University in 1945 and a Ph.D. in 1950. He worked at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica from 1949 to 1955. He then taught at the University of Chicago from 1955 to 1960, and at UCLA until 2001. Hirshleifer was well known for his work on uncertainty and information in economics, the economic analysis of conflict, and bioeconomics. His undergraduate textbook, Price Theory and Applications, went into seven editions. A 1958 article by Hirshleifer began the triumphant comeback of Irving Fisher's theory of capital and interest, now deemed canonical.
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Richard B. Freeman
#5541
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Barry Freeman is an economist. The Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Freeman is also Senior Research Fellow on Labour Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance, part of the London School of Economics, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the UK's public body funding social science. Freeman directs the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research , a network focused on the economics of science, technical, engineering, and I...
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Oded Galor
#3914
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory. Galor has contributed to the understanding of development over the entire course of human history and prehistory, and the role of deep-rooted factors in the transition from stagnation to growth and in the emergence of global inequality. He also pioneered the exploration of the impact of human evolution, population diversity, and inequality on the process of development over most of human existence.
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Marcel Fratzscher
#9384
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Marcel Fratzscher is a German economist and professor at Humboldt-University of Berlin. Since February 2013 he has been president of the Berlin-based economic research institute DIW Berlin. He was previously head of International Policy Analysis at the European Central Bank. He also teaches International Finance in the Ph.D. programme in Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt.
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Fernando Vianello
#8386
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Fernando Vianello was an Italian economist and academic. Together with Michele Salvati, Sebastiano Brusco, Andrea Ginzburg and Salvatore Biasco, he founded the Faculty of Economics of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
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Tibor Scitovsky
#12788
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Tibor de Scitovsky, also known as Tibor Scitovsky , was a Hungarian born, American economist who was best known for his writing on the nature of people's happiness in relation to consumption. He was associate professor and professor of economics at Stanford University from 1946 through 1958 and Eberle Professor of Economics from 1970 until his retirement in 1976, when he became Professor Emeritus. In honor of his deep contributions to economic analysis, he was elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, member of the American Academy...
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Robert Hall
#8455
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Ernest "Bob" Hall is an American economist who serves as a professor of economics at Stanford University and as the Robert and Carole McNeil Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is generally considered a macroeconomist, but he describes himself as an applied economist.
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Paul Collier
#3724
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Paul Collier, is a British development economist who serves as the Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government and the director of the International Growth Centre.
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Mark Gertler
#11893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Mark Lionel Gertler is an American economist, and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Economics at New York University . A specialist in business cycles and monetary policy, he has been an associate and collaborator of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for more than 30 years. He is among the 20 most cited economists in the world.
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Ursula von der Leyen
#141
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German physician and politician serving as the 13th president of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding successive positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as minister of defence. Von der Leyen is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its EU affiliated group, the European People's Party .
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Martin Weitzman
#7542
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Martin Lawrence Weitzman was an economist and a professor of economics at Harvard University. He was among the most influential economists in the world according to Research Papers in Economics . His latest research was largely focused on environmental economics, specifically climate change and the economics of catastrophes.
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Marc Melitz
#7345
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Marc J. Melitz is an American economist. He is currently a professor of economics at Harvard University. Melitz has published a number of highly cited articles in the area of international economics and international trade, most notably "The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity" in Econometrica which explores the effects of international trade on the competition within domestic industries.
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Ben Fine
#6028
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Background Fine was born in Coventry in 1948. One of six brothers, he and all but one other followed their father and studied mathematics at the University of Oxford. Fine graduated at the age of 20, and then was recruited by Sir James Mirrlees, completing an economics degree. He took his doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics, under the supervision of Amartya Sen, in 1974. He moved to the newly established economics department at Birkbeck, University of London, later working part-time as an industrial economist at the Greater London Council prior to its abolition.
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M. Hashem Pesaran
#11675
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mohammad Hashem Pesaran is a British–Iranian economist. He received his BSc in economics at the University of Salford and his PhD in Economics at Cambridge University. Previously, Pesaran was professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the John Elliott Distinguished Chair in Economics at the University of Southern California and has held that position since August 2005. He also serves as the director of the USC Dornsife Center for Applied Financial Economics Research. In January 2013, he was made a dis...
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Susan Athey
#6600
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research. She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action.
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Manuel Arellano
#15166
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Manuel Arellano is a Spanish economist specialising in econometrics and empirical microeconomics. Together with Stephen Bond, he developed the Arellano–Bond estimator, a widely used GMM estimator for panel data. This estimator is based on the earlier article by Arellano's PhD supervisor, John Denis Sargan, and Alok Bhargava . RePEc lists the paper about the Arellano-Bond estimator as the most cited article in economics.
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Edward Lazear
#5182
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Edward Paul Lazear was an American economist, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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Franklin M. Fisher
#12825
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004. Biography Fisher attended Harvard University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1955 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956, followed by a Master's degree in 1957 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1960. His doctoral thesis was entitled A Priori Information and Time Series Analysis.
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Anne Case
#4871
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anne Catherine Case, Lady Deaton, is an American economist who is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emeritus, at Princeton University. Early life and career Case graduated with a BA degree from the State University of New York at Albany in 1980, and subsequently obtained an MPA degree in 1983 and a PhD in economics in 1988, both from Princeton University. After working as an assistant professor in the department of economics at Harvard University from 1988-1991, she has worked in departments of economics at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wil...
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Mark Skousen
#3171
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mark Andrew Skousen is an American economist and writer. He currently teaches at Chapman University, where he is since 2022 a Doti-Spogli Chair in Free Enterprise at The George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics. He has previously taught at Columbia Business School, Mercy College, Barnard College, and Rollins College.
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Whitney K. Newey
#13770
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Whitney Kent Newey is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a well-known econometrician. He is best known for developing, with Kenneth D. West, the Newey–West estimator, which robustly estimates the covariance matrix of a regression model when errors are heteroskedastic and autocorrelated.
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David Forbes Hendry
#7099
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sir David Forbes Hendry, FBA CStat is a British econometrician, currently a professor of economics and from 2001 to 2007 was head of the economics department at the University of Oxford. He is also a professorial fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.
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Dean Baker
#2091
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research with Mark Weisbrot. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble.
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Mariana Mazzucato
#3905
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#295
Assar Lindbeck
#7747
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Carl Assar Eugén Lindbeck was a Swedish professor of economics at Stockholm University and at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics . Lindbeck was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and previously chaired the Academy's prize committee for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was the first Swede to be appointed a foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, and one of only three Swedes ever.
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Guido Imbens
#3854
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Guido Wilhelmus Imbens is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 2012.
Go to Profile#297
Nicola Acocella
#5771
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Nicola Acocella is an Italian economist and academic, Emeritus Professor of Economic Policy since 2014. In 1963 he graduated in Economics from the “Sapienza University of Rome” with a thesis on ‘Time lags in economic policy’, under the supervision of Federico Caffè. After becoming full professor , he got a reputation for his holistic contribution to systematisation and development of Economic policy. He also introduced remarkable innovations in the theory of economic policy as well as in monetary and fiscal policy and the theory of social pacts.
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Margaret Thatcher
#323
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher , was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving of the 20th century. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
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Lester Thurow
#4716
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Lester Carl Thurow was an American political economist, former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of books on economic topics. Education Born in Livingston, Montana, Thurow received his B.A. in political economy from Williams College in 1960, where he was in Theta Delta Chi and Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and a Tyng Scholar. After he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he went to Balliol College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1962 with first class honors. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1964.
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Paulo Guedes
#5243
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paulo Roberto Nunes Guedes is a Brazilian economist and co-founder of the investment bank BTG Pactual. He is also a co-founder of the think-tank Instituto Millenium, and was the economic advisor for the campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro. Guedes served as the Minister of Economics of Brazil through the entirety of the Bolsonaro presidency, from 1 January 2019 to 1 January 2023.
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