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,
#301
Duncan K. Foley
#8025
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Duncan K. Foley is an American economist. He is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and Stanford, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University . He has held visiting professorships at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, as well as the New School for Social Research .
Go to Profile#302
Betsey Stevenson
#7227
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Betsey Ayer Stevenson is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. The Obama Administration announced her appointment as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, a post she served from 2013 through 2015. She previously served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis from 2010 to 2011.
Go to Profile#303
Ariel Rubinstein
#3275
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ariel Rubinstein is an Israeli economist who works in economic theory, game theory and bounded rationality. Biography Ariel Rubinstein is a professor of economics at the School of Economics at Tel Aviv University and the Department of Economics at New York University. He studied mathematics and economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1972–1979 .
Go to Profile#304
Maria da Conceição Tavares
#6858
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Maria da Conceição Tavares is a Portuguese naturalized Brazilian economist. She is a full professor at the State University of Campinas and professor emeritus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro . Her students have included the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. Tavares is affiliated with the Workers' Party, and she was a Federal Deputy representing the state of Rio de Janeiro between 1995 and 1999. Left-wing focused, she is the author of several books on Brazil's economic development as well as numerous journal articles.
Go to Profile#305
Clive Spash
#7915
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Clive L. Spash is an ecological economist. He currently holds the Chair of Public Policy and Governance at Vienna University of Economics and Business, appointed in 2010. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Environmental Values.
Go to Profile#306
Philippe Aghion
#5370
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Philippe Mario Aghion is a French economist who is a professor at the , at INSEAD, and at the London School of Economics. He also teaches at the Paris School of Economics. From 2002 to 2015, he was the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Prior to that, he was a professor at University College London, an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#307
Henry Manne
#4642
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Henry G. Manne was an American writer and academic, considered a founder of the law and economics discipline. He was Dean Emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Manne held a B.A. in economics from Vanderbilt University , J.D. from the University of Chicago , LLM from Yale University , J.S.D. from Yale University , LL.D. from Seattle University , LL.D. from the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala and LLD from George Mason University .
Go to Profile#308
Masahiko Aoki
#5485
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Masahiko Aoki was a Japanese economist, Tomoye and Henri Takahashi Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies in the Economics Department, and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Aoki was known for his work in comparative institutional analysis, corporate governance, the theory of the firm, and comparative East Asian development.
Go to Profile#309
W. Allen Wallis
#3489
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Wilson Allen Wallis was an American economist and statistician who served as president of the University of Rochester. He is best known for the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance, which is named after him and William Kruskal.
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Richard Tol
#7075
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Richard S. J. Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. He is also professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
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Kenneth D. West
#14705
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kenneth David West is the John D. MacArthur and Ragnar Frisch Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and has previously served as co-editor of the American Economic Review. He has published widely in the fields of macroeconomics, finance, international economics and econometrics. Among his honors are the John M. Stauffer National Fellowship in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and Abe Fellowship. He...
Go to Profile#312
Stephen Ross
#3787
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Stephen Alan "Steve" Ross was the inaugural Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management after a long career as the Sterling Professor of Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is known for initiating several important theories and models in financial economics. He was a widely published author in finance and economics, and was a coauthor of a best-selling Corporate Finance textbook.
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Douglas Hague
#12265
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Sir Douglas Chalmers Hague was a British economist who was a close associate of Margaret Thatcher. Biography Hague was born in Bramley, Leeds, to Laurence Hague, a municipal clerk and Marion . The family moved to Birmingham when he was three years old. Hague was educated at Moseley Grammar School and King Edward's School, Birmingham, and took a bachelor of commerce degree at Birmingham University. He was assistant lecturer, then lecturer, then Reader in Political Economy at University College, London, 1947–57.
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W. Arthur Lewis
#3238
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Sir William Arthur Lewis was a Saint Lucian economist and the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University. Lewis was known for his contributions in the field of economic development. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to Profile#315
Jeremy Rifkin
#1012
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeremy Rifkin is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 23 books about the influence of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Age of Resilience , The Green New Deal , The Zero Marginal Cost Society , The Third Industrial Revolution , The Empathic Civilization , and The European Dream .
Go to Profile#316
Thomas Palley
#14312
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thomas Palley is an American economist who was the chief economist for the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Career Palley received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University in 1976. He earned a master's degree in international relations and a PhD in economics from Yale University. Palley founded the Economics for Democratic & Open Societies project. He states its purpose is to "stimulate public discussion about what kinds of economic arrangements and conditions are needed to promote democracy and open society." Palley's previous positions include director ...
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William A. Barnett
#11665
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Arnold Barnett is an American economist, whose current work is in the fields of chaos, bifurcation, and nonlinear dynamics in socioeconomic contexts, econometric modeling of consumption and production, and the study of the aggregation problem and the challenges of measurement in economics.
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Bjørn Lomborg
#3021
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist .
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Yew-Kwang Ng
#5824
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Yew-Kwang Ng is a Malaysian-Australian economist, who is currently Special Chair Professor of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published in a variety of academic disciplines and is best known for his work in welfare economics.
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Angus Maddison
#2565
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Angus Maddison was a distinguished British economist specialising in quantitative macro economic history, including the measurement and analysis of economic growth and development. Maddison lectured at several universities over the course of his career, including the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Harvard University. In 1978, Maddison was appointed Historical Professor in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Groningen . He retired in 1996 and became Emeritus Professor.
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Stephanie Kelton
#5819
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Stephanie A Kelton is an American heterodox economist and academic, and a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. She served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Senate Budget Committee under his chairmanship. She is also the author of The Deficit Myth, a New York Times bestseller, on the subject of Modern Monetary Theory.
Go to Profile#322
Richard Musgrave
#8906
Overall Influence
1910 - 2007 (97 years)
Richard Abel Musgrave was an American economist of German heritage. His most cited work is The Theory of Public Finance , described as "the first English-language treatise in the field," and "a major contribution to public finance thought."
Go to Profile#323
Nicolaus Tideman
#9734
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Thorwald Nicolaus Tideman is a Georgist economist and professor at Virginia Tech. He received his Bachelor of Arts in economics and mathematics from Reed College in 1965 and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1969. Tideman was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University from 1969 to 1973, during which time from 1970 to 1971 he was a Senior Staff Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Since 1973, he has been at Virginia Tech, with various visiting positions at Harvard Kennedy School , University of Buckingham , and the American Institute f...
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Uri Gneezy
#6856
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Uri Hezkia Gneezy is an Israeli-American behavioral economist, known for his work on incentives. He currently holds the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management. He is also a visiting research professor at the University of Amsterdam and NHH in Bergen.
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George J. Borjas
#5024
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
George Jesus Borjas is a Cuban-American economist and the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been described as "America’s leading immigration economist" and "the leading sceptic of immigration among economists". Borjas has published a number of studies that conclude that low-skilled immigration adversely affects low-skilled natives , a proposition that is debated among economists.
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Joshua Angrist
#8480
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
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Fred Foldvary
#9245
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Fred Emanuel Foldvary was a lecturer in economics at San Jose State University, California, and a research fellow at The Independent Institute. He previously taught at Santa Clara University and other colleges. He was also a commentator and senior editor for the online journal The Progress Report and an associate editor of the online journal Econ Journal Watch. He served on the board of directors for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
Go to Profile#328
Michael Kremer
#4700
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#329
Pascal Salin
#8693
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Pascal Salin is a French economist, professor emeritus at the Université Paris-Dauphine and a specialist in public finance and monetary economics. He is a former president of the Mont Pelerin Society .
Go to Profile#330
Anita Summers
#9921
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Anita Arrow Summers was an American educator of public policy, management, real estate and education and was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Anita Arrow was born in New York City on September 9, 1925. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Summers received a B.A. in Economics from Hunter College in 1945 and an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1947. She earned an honorary doctorate from Hunter College. She married Robert Summers in 1953 and left the workforce to raise three sons.
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Isabel Schnabel
#7806
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Isabel Schnabel is a German economist who has been serving as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2020. She became professor of financial economics at the University of Bonn in 2015 and a member of the German Council of Economic Experts in 2014. She worked previously at the University of Mainz from 2007 to 2015.
Go to Profile#332
Ricardo Reis
#13309
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is a Portuguese economist and the A. W. Phillips professor of economics at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on macroeconomics, including both monetary and fiscal policy, inflation and business cycles, and for these he won the 2021 Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation medal awarded every two years by the European Economic Association for best economist under the age of 45. He writes a weekly op-ed for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
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Bruno Frey
#7622
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruno S. Frey is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include Political economy and Happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.
Go to Profile#334
Austan Goolsbee
#4107
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Austan Dean Goolsbee is an American economist and writer. He is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Goolsbee formerly served as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2010 to 2011 and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. He served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 2018 to 2019.
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Stefan Homburg
#9267
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Stefan Homburg is a German professor of economics. He was the director of the Institute of Public Finance at the University of Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany until 2021. Outside academia he is best known for his controversial statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Go to Profile#336
Richard Blundell
#10574
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Richard William Blundell CBE FBA is a British economist and econometrician. Blundell is the David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Economics of University College London and the Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is also Associate Faculty Member, TSE, Toulouse. He was the Research Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies between 1986 and 2016. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society , Fellow of the British Academy , Honorary Member of the American Economic Association , Hon...
Go to Profile#337
Edward J. Nell
#4840
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Edward J. Nell is an American economist and a former professor at the New School for Social Research. Nell was a member of the New School faculty from 1969 to 2014. He achieved the rank of Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Economics in 1990.
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Herbert Giersch
#14790
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Herbert Giersch was a German economist. He was one of the initial members of the German Council of Economic Experts in 1964, serving on the council until 1970, and also was president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy 1969–1989. Giersch was considered the most influential German economist during the chancellorships of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl.
Go to Profile#339
Dean Karlan
#5050
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action , a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Allan H. Meltzer
#9218
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Allan H. Meltzer was an American economist and Allan H. Meltzer Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and Institute for Politics and Strategy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Meltzer specialized on studying monetary policy and the US Federal Reserve System, and authored several academic papers and books on the development and applications of monetary policy, and about the history of central banking in the US. Together with Karl Brunner, he created the Shadow Open Market Committee: a monetarist council that deeply criticized the Federal Open Mark...
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Arnold Zellner
#11168
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Arnold Zellner was an American economist and statistician specializing in the fields of Bayesian probability and econometrics. Zellner contributed pioneering work in the field of Bayesian analysis and econometric modeling.
Go to Profile#342
David Laidler
#10684
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993 , initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Ch...
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Mark Satterthwaite
#7681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mark Allen Satterthwaite is an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is currently an A.C. Buehler Professor in Hospital & Health Services Management, Professor of Strategic Management & Managerial Economics, and chair of the Management & Strategy Department. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#344
Xavier Gabaix
#10240
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Xavier Gabaix is a French economist, currently the Pershing Square Professor of Economics and Finance at Harvard University. He has been listed among the top 8 young economists in the world by The Economist. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as well as a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#345
Hernando de Soto
#2292
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Hernando Soto Polar is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. His work on the developing world has earned him praise worldwide by numerous heads of state, particularly for his publication The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path. He is the current president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy , a think tank devoted to promoting economic development in developing countries located in Lima, Peru.
Go to Profile#346
Charles Wyplosz
#11488
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Charles Wyplosz is a French economist. He is an editor of the International Centre for Economic Policy Research's VoxEU and is currently the director of the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies and Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a founding managing editor of Economic Policy.
Go to Profile#347
Richard Lipsey
#8207
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Richard George Lipsey, is a Canadian academic and economist. He is best known for his work on the economics of the second-best, a theory that demonstrated that piecemeal establishing of individual first best conditions would not necessarily raise welfare in a situation in which all first best conditions could not be satisfied, an article that he co-authored with Kelvin Lancaster. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
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David Hirshleifer
#7658
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Hirshleifer is an American economist. He is a professor of finance and currently holds the Merage chair in Business Growth at the University of California at Irvine. As of 2018 he became President-Elect of the American Finance Association. In 2017, he was elected as Vice President of the American Finance Association and assigned as research associate to National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously a professor at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and UCLA. His research is mostly related to behavioral finance and informational cascades. In 2007, he was on the...
Go to Profile#349
Paul Ormerod
#4549
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Paul Andrew Ormerod is a British economist who is a partner at Volterra Partners consultancy. Additionally, he is a visiting professor at UCL Centre for Decision Making Uncertainty. Research Ormerod has researched complexity, complex systems, nonlinear feedback, the boom and bust cycle of business and economic competition. He uses a multidisciplinary approach, making use of biology, physics, mathematics, statistics and psychology as sources of results that can be applied to economics.
Go to Profile#350
David K. Levine
#6220
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Knudsen Levine is department of Economics and Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study Joint Chair at the European University Institute; he is John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. His research includes the study of intellectual property and endogenous growth in dynamic general equilibrium models, the endogenous formation of preferences, social norms and institutions, learning in games, and game theory applications to experimental economics.
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