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,
#3201
Ashish Arora
#147164
Overall Influence
#3202
Patric Henry Hendershott
#147202
Overall Influence
#3203
George Haley
#49574
Overall Influence
George T. Haley is an American author and academic, currently a tenured professor of industrial and international marketing at the University of New Haven in the US state of Connecticut. He is also the director of the Center for International Industry Competitiveness. His research covers industrial marketing, emerging markets, new product development, innovation and B2B marketing. He has testified about his research on China before the United States Congress and several government agencies. The American Marketing Association's Marketing News named him as one of six marketing academics to watch based on his research, teaching and broader impact.
Go to Profile#3204
Ramkishen S. Rajan
#147370
Overall Influence
#3205
Harold Rose
#70292
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Harold Bertram Rose was an English economist and professor at the London School of Economics and the London Business School. He served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and participated in the Battle of Ramree Island in 1945.
Go to Profile#3206
Karlis Muehlenbachs
#147441
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
#3207
Francesca Molinari
#88953
Overall Influence
Francesca Molinari is an Italian economist and economic statististician specializing in theoretical and applied econometrics, whose research topics include risk aversion, survey methodology, and set identification. She is H. T. Warshow and Robert Irving Warshow Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#3208
Michael Esman Chernew
#147447
Overall Influence
#3209
Michael H. Belzer
#50954
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Michael H. Belzer is an American academic and former truck driver, known as an internationally recognized expert on the trucking industry, especially the institutional and economic impact of deregulation. He is a professor in the economics department at Wayne State University. He is the author of Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation . Along with Gregory M. Saltzman, he coauthored Truck Driver Occupational Safety and Health: 2003 Conference Report and Selective Literature Review, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2007. He has written many pe...
Go to Profile#3210
Austin Frakt
#52184
Overall Influence
Austin B. Frakt is an American health economist who holds positions with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. He is widely known as the founder and co-editor-in-chief of The Incidental Economist. His academic research has been published in major academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs. Frakt supports the use of mainstream media as a means of translating academic research into policy relevance and has contributed to outlets including The New York Times and Bloomberg News. He serves on editorial bo...
Go to Profile#3211
Tiziana Di Matteo
#108895
Overall Influence
Tiziana Di Matteo is a Professor of Econophysics at King's College London. She studies complex systems, such as financial markets, and complex materials . She serves on the council of the Complex Systems Society.
Go to Profile#3212
Andrew Schotter
#147932
Overall Influence
#3213
Agustín Maravall
#122708
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Agustín Maravall Herrero is a Spanish economist. He is known for his contributions to the analysis of statistics and econometrics, particularly in seasonal adjustment and the estimation of signals in economic time series. He created a methodology and several computer programs for such analysis that are used throughout the world by analysts, researchers, and data producers. Maravall retired in December 2014 from the Bank of Spain.
Go to Profile#3214
Rolfe Sean Morrison
#148119
Overall Influence
#3215
Richard Geddes
#77782
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
R. Richard Geddes is an American academic specializing in infrastructure policy. He is a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, where he is director of its infrastructure program.
Go to Profile#3216
Eric Finkelstein
#78459
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric Andrew Finkelstein is an American health economist. He is a Professor in the Health Services & Systems Research Program at Duke-NUS Medical School, where he is also the executive director of the Lien Centre for Palliative Care. He is also a research professor at Duke University's Global Health Institute.
Go to Profile#3217
Alfred Galichon
#113521
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Alfred Galichon is a French economist and mathematician. His work focuses on quantitative economics and econometrics. He is a professor of economics and of mathematics at New York University. Life and work Galichon was born in Paris. He is a professor at New York University in the Courant Institute, and the director of NYU Paris. Previously, he had been a full professor at Ecole Polytechnique, and then at Sciences Po, Paris. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and Corps des Mines, and holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#3218
Alfonso Gambardella
#148379
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#3219
Evelyn Matthei
#70777
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Evelyn Rose Matthei Fornet is a Chilean politician and the current mayor of Providencia, a prosperous commune of Santiago, serving since 2016. Prior to her current position, she held the role of Deputy in the Chilean Congress from 1990 to 1998, and subsequently served as a Senator from 1998 to 2011. In January 2011, she left her Senate seat to assume the role of Minister of Labor and Social Security under Chilean President Sebastián Piñera until July 2013. In the 2013 Chilean general election, she ran for President with the support of the Independent Democrat Union Party. However, she lost in...
Go to Profile#3220
Hiroshi Konno
#148483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
#3221
Richard Baillie
#146645
Overall Influence
Richard T. Baillie is a British–American economist and statistician who is currently the A J Pasant Professor of Economics at the Michigan State University. He is also part time professor at King's College, London, and Senior Scientific Officer for the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis in Italy, and also on the Executive Council of the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics in Econometrics .
Go to Profile#3222
Coşkun Can Aktan
#100943
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Coşkun Can Aktan is a political economist and a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Management at Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir, Turkey. He is founder and honorary chairman of the Social Sciences Research Society. Aktan is a leading expert on the privatization of the Turkish economy, analyzing and writing on the movement of Turkey from a statist to a market economy from its early days, making Aktan an early and internationally known source of information on Turkey's move toward a market-based economy.
Go to Profile#3223
Anders Hjern
#148560
Overall Influence
#3224
Jan‐egbert Sturm
#148737
Overall Influence
#3225
Marion Clawson
#92759
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Robert Marion Clawson was an American agricultural economist. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from 1929 to 1946. In 1948, he became the second director of the Bureau of Land Management, where he served until 1953.
Go to Profile#3226
Richard Disney
#107972
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Disney is an economist. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a Visiting Professor in the Department of Economics at University College, London, a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and was a part-time Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, now Emeritus.
Go to Profile#3227
Kenneth Cortsen
#84437
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Kenneth Cortsen is a Danish sport management researcher from Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University and Associate Professor from University College of Northern Denmark , Department of Sport Management. His work places research at the heart of commercialization of sports.
Go to Profile#3228
Mary G. Clawson
#148850
Overall Influence
#3229
Beth E. Allen
#104154
Overall Influence
Beth Elaine Allen is a professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and has served as the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in that department. At the University of Minnesota, she teaches Advanced Game Theory and Advanced Topics in Economics. She graduated with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. She specializes in competition, economic theory, economic trends, economics of information and uncertainty, game theory, microeconomic theory, microeconomics, and price-setting. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, an...
Go to Profile#3230
Alan Barrett
#104045
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alan Barrett is the Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute. He joined the ESRI in 1994 and took up the position of Director in July 2015. His research is primarily focused on labour economics and population economics and is widely published. He worked as Project Director of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing at Trinity College Dublin and has served as a member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. He is a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland. He is also a member of the Natio...
Go to Profile#3231
Antoni Kukliński
#124382
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Antoni Kukliński was a Polish professor of economics specializing in economic geography and research policy. From 1967 to 1971 he was director of regional research program at UNRISD . He was a founder of the Centre for European Regional and Local Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland.
Go to Profile#3232
Thomas Baumgartner
#55826
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Thomas Martin Baumgartner is a Swiss economist, known for his pioneering work in social systems theory with Walter F. Buckley, Tom R. Burns and others. Life and work Baumgartner started his academic career at the University of New Hampshire, where he received his PhD in economics 1976 with the dissertation The political economy of international economic exchange and development : a systems approach to the structuring of the international economic system.
Go to Profile#3233
Michael Peter Devereux
#148998
Overall Influence
#3234
Ronald Wellisz Stanislaw Findlay
#149216
Overall Influence
#3235
Natalia Zubarevich
#25357
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Natalya Vasilyevna Zubarevich is a Russian economist-geographer specializing on the socio-economic development of the regions. She has been the professor of the Department of Economic And Social Geography of Russia of the Moscow State University since 2005.
Go to Profile#3236
Massimo Filippini
#149233
Overall Influence
#3237
Bo Honoré
#89537
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Bo Honoré is a Danish economist who is currently the Class of 1913 Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#3238
Martin C. Libicki
#49754
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Martin C. Libicki is an American scholar and Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California. Early life Martin C. Libicki graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. He went on to receive a master's degree in City and Regional Planning as well as a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3239
L. L. Rainwater
#149430
Overall Influence
#3240
Ronald J. Wonnacott
#118328
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Ronald Johnston Wonnacott was a Canadian economist. Wonnacott received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Western Ontario, then earned a doctorate from Harvard University. He taught at Western from 1958 to 1996, and served as William G. Davis Professor of International Trade. He was president of the Canadian Economics Association 1981/1982.
Go to Profile#3241
Ramón Tamames
#99585
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ramón Tamames Gómez is a Spanish economist and former politician. He was a member of the Congress of Deputies and the City Council of Madrid in the early years after the Spanish transition to democracy. A long-term member of the Communist Party of Spain , he left in 1982 and founded the Progressive Federation and the United Left . He left politics in 1989 after several months with the Democratic and Social Centre . In 2023, aged 89, he was proposed as a candidate for prime minister of Spain in a vote of no confidence tabled by Vox.
Go to Profile#3242
Mark B. Mcclellan
#149613
Overall Influence
#3243
Robert B. Reich
#149653
Overall Influence
#3244
Beatrice Cherrier
#100542
Overall Influence
Beatrice Cherrier is a historian of economics and associate professor at CREST, CNRS, and ENSAE/Ecole Polytechnique, France. Her research interests include the history of economics since World War II. She has been cited in the popular media on several topics in the history of economics, including theories of discrimination, the rise of the MIT economics department, and the representation of women in the economics profession.
Go to Profile#3245
Paolo Lazzeretti
#149725
Overall Influence
#3246
Dennis W. Carlton
#149773
Overall Influence
#3247
Peter Anthony Larkin
#92504
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Peter Anthony Larkin, was a fisheries scientist who spent most of his career at the University of British Columbia. After his PhD at the Exeter College, Oxford, he moved to Canada as the Chief Fisheries Biologist of British Columbia, in a joint appointment between the provincial government and the University of British Columbia . At UBC, he later served as the Head of the Department of Zoology , as the Dean of Graduate Studies , and as the Vice President Research . He authored some 160 scientific papers. He was also an admired teacher who won UBC's Master Teacher Award in 1971. Outside UBC, ...
Go to Profile#3248
Hubert Schmitz
#149857
Overall Influence
#3249
Peter Quartey
#100917
Overall Influence
Peter Quartey is a Ghanaian economist and the Director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research of the University of Ghana, since 2019. He is a professor of development economics at the University of Ghana.
Go to Profile#3250
Daniel E. Schindler
#149897
Overall Influence
