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).
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#351
Alok Bhargava
#7377
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Alok Bhargava is an Indian econometrician. He studied mathematics at Delhi University and economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics. He is currently a full professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
Go to Profile#352
Stanley Engerman
#3771
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Stanley Lewis Engerman was an American economist and economic historian. He was known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel. His first major book, co-authored with Robert Fogel in 1974, was Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. This significant work, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American history, challenged readers to think critically about the economics of slavery. Engerman has also published over 100 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited 16 book-length studies.
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Frank Stilwell
#11566
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Franklin "Frank" J.B. Stilwell is an Australian political economist and Professor Emeritus. He is known for establishing, with Evan Jones, Gavan Butler, Margaret Power, Debesh Bhattacharya, Geelum Simpson-Lee and Ted Wheelwright, an independent political economy department at the University of Sydney. His research interests include theories of political economy, inequality, urbanization, and regional development, Australian economic policy and the nature of work. His textbooks on the subject are standard teaching material for all university students in Australia studying the field of Political Economy.
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Robert Cooter
#6139
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert D. Cooter is the Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Cooter works in the field of law and economics. He is co-editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, and was among those convened by George Mason University Law School dean, Henry Manne, in January, 1990, to discuss organizing a professional association, prior to formation of the American Law and Economics Association; Cooter was subsequently elected as a founding board member, then served as its president for 1994. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of ...
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Emmanuel Farhi
#10086
Overall Influence
1978 - 2020 (42 years)
Emmanuel Farhi was a French economist and professor of economics at Harvard University. His research focused on macroeconomics, taxation and finance. He was a member of the French Economic Analysis Council to the French Prime Minister from 2010 to 2012.
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Richard Koo
#4484
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard C. Koo is a Taiwanese economist living in Japan specializing in balance sheet recessions. He is Chief Economist at the Nomura Research Institute. Early life and education Koo was born in Kobe. His father, Koo Kwang-ming, was an activist in the Taiwan independence movement then living in exile in Japan, and the brother of the prominent Taiwanese businessman Koo Chen-fu. Koo lived in Tokyo for 13 years in his youth, and later attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received a BA degree in Political Science and Government in 1976. He then proceeded to Johns Hopkins Unive...
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Dale T. Mortensen
#4681
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Dale Thomas Mortensen was an American economist, a professor at Northwestern University, and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early life and education Mortensen was born in Enterprise, Oregon. He received his BA in economics from Willamette University and his PhD in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
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William G. Bowen
#3364
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
William Gordon Bowen was an American academic who served as the president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, serving as its president from 1988 to 2006. From 1972 until 1988, he was the president of Princeton University. Bowen founded the digital library, JSTOR.
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Christopher Freeman
#4192
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Christopher Freeman a British economist, recognised as one of the founders of the post-war school of Innovation Studies. He played a lead role in the development of the neo-Schumpeterian tradition focusing on the crucial role of innovation for economic development and of scientific and technological activities for well-being.
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Fredmund Malik
#4169
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Fredmund Malik is an Austrian economist with focus on management science and the founder and chairman of a management consultancy in St. Gallen. Malik applies systems theory and cybernetics to analyse and design management systems. From 1974 to 2004 he was teaching at the University of St. Gallen, where he is titular professor for general management, leadership and governance.
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Randall Wright
#13945
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Randall D. Wright is a Canadian academic macroeconomist who advanced the fields of monetary economics and labor economics through his role in the development of matching theory. Biography Wright obtained a B.A. in Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Minnesota in 1986. He was awarded an honorary M.A. by the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. His first position was as an assistant professor at Cornell from 1984 to 1987. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a full professor in 1994, later becoming the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor of Economics.
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Eamonn Butler
#6270
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Eamonn Butler is a British economist. He is the co-founder and director of the Adam Smith Institute. Early life Eamonn Butler was born in 1953. His brother is Stuart Butler. He graduated from the University of St Andrews. and also studied at the University of Aberdeen.
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James R. Hines Jr.
#6894
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
James R. Hines Jr. is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions.
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Amy Finkelstein
#10437
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Amy Nadya Finkelstein is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.
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Jacques Drèze
#10605
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Jacques H. Drèze was a Belgian economist noted for his contributions to economic theory, econometrics, and economic policy as well as for his leadership in the economics profession. Drèze was the first President of the European Economic Association in 1986 and was the President of the Econometric Society in 1970.
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Jeffrey Wooldridge
#15213
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Marc Wooldridge is an American econometrician. He is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. Wooldridge is known for his theoretical contributions to the analysis of cross-sectional and panel data.
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David Colander
#14254
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Charles Colander is an American economist, and the Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. He is known for his study of the economics profession itself and socioeconomics. His books The Making of an Economist and its later edition, The Making of an Economist, Redux, have been called "essential reading for prospective graduate students". He has authored over 35 books and 100 articles on a wide variety of subjects. He has expressed interest in complexity economics. His latest work focuses on economic education, complexity, and the methodology appr...
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Hersh Shefrin
#6561
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hersh Shefrin is a Canadian economist best known for his pioneering work in behavioral finance. Shefrin received his B.S. from University of Manitoba in 1970. At the University of Waterloo in 1971 he received his M.S. in mathematics. He then obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1974, after which he became assistant professor at the University of Rochester. In 1979 he was appointed professor at the Santa Clara University, first in the department of economics and then in 1990 to the department of finance.
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Laura Tyson
#4153
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Laura D'Andrea Tyson is an American economist and university administrator who is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She served as the 16th Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd Director of the National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996 under President Bill Clinton. Tyson was the first woman to hold each of those posts. She remains the only person to have served in both posts.
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Hugo F. Sonnenschein
#4027
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Hugo Freund Sonnenschein was an American economist and educational administrator. He served as president of the University of Chicago from 1993 to 2000. Early life Sonnenschein was born in New York City on November 14, 1940. He was raised in Brooklyn. He attended Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, New York, graduating in 1957. He studied at the University of Rochester, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. He subsequently undertook postgraduate studies at Purdue University, earning a Master of Science in 1962 and a Doctor of Philosophy two years later.
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Richard Cyert
#3811
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Richard Michael Cyert was an American economist, statistician and organizational theorist, who served as the sixth President of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He is known for his seminal 1959 work "A behavioral theory of the firm," co-authored with James G. March.
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Phillip D. Cagan
#9588
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Phillip David Cagan was an American scholar and author. He was Professor of Economics Emeritus at Columbia University. Biography Born in Seattle, Washington, Cagan and his family moved to Southern California shortly thereafter. Cagan joined the U.S. Navy at age 17 and fought in World War II. After the war, Cagan decided to go to college, and earned his B.A. from UCLA in 1948. Cagan received his M.A. in 1951, and his Ph.D. in Economics in 1954 from the University of Chicago.
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Stephen Moore
#5260
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Stephen Moore is an American conservative writer and television commentator on economic issues. He co-founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004. Moore is a former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He worked at The Heritage Foundation from 1983 to 1987 and again since 2014. Moore advised Herman Cain's 2012 presidential campaign and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
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Robert Z. Lawrence
#7731
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Robert Zachary Lawrence is a South Africa-born American economist and Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Hans Singer
#8313
Overall Influence
1910 - 2006 (96 years)
Sir Hans Wolfgang Singer was a German-born British development economist best known for the Prebisch-Singer thesis, which states that the terms of trade move against producers of primary products. He is one of the primary figures of heterodox economics.
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Anders Åslund
#3333
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Per Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research .
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Mark Rubinstein
#4603
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Mark Edward Rubinstein was a leading financial economist and financial engineer. He was Paul Stephens Professor of Applied Investment Analysis at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley. He held various other professional offices, directing the American Finance Association, amongst others, and was editor of several first-tier academic journals including both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Finance. He was the author of numerous papers and four books.
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Charles Tilly
#589
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Charles Tilly was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1984 before becoming the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.
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David Teece
#4412
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David John Teece is a New Zealand-born US-based organizational economist and the Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Marc Nerlove
#13344
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Marc Leon Nerlove is an American agricultural economist and econometrician and a distinguished university professor emeritus in agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 1969 and held appointments at eight different universities from 1958–2016. The Clark Medal is awarded to an economist under the age of 40 who “is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”, and when the AEA appointed him as a distinguished fellow in 2012, they cited his de...
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Daniel S. Hamermesh
#17080
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Daniel Selim Hamermesh is a U.S. economist, and Sue Killam Professor in the Foundations of Economics Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor . Previously professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London and Michigan State University. He was formerly a Distinguished Scholar at Barnard College.
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Mervyn King, Baron King of Lothbury
#3498
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Mervyn Allister King, Baron King of Lothbury is a British economist and public servant who served as the Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013. He is a School Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is also the Chairman of the Philharmonia.
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Kenneth French
#4046
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
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Alan Walters
#5010
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Sir Alan Arthur Walters was a British economist who was best known as the Chief Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1983 and again for five months in 1989. Early life Walters was born in Leicester. His father was a Communist and a grocer who sold goods from a van. He failed his 11-Plus and attended Alderman Newton's School in Leicester, leaving at fifteen to work as a machine operator in a shoe factory. During World War II, he was called up and joined the British Army as a private.
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Vittorio Grilli
#6268
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Vittorio Grilli is an Italian economist and academic. He was Italy's minister of economy and finance from 2012 to 2013 as part of the Monti cabinet. Education Grilli was born in Milan on 19 May 1957. He graduated from Bocconi University in Milan in 1981 with a master of arts degree in economics. He received a PhD in economics from the University of Rochester in 1986.
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Jacob A. Frenkel
#9924
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jacob Aharon Frenkel is an Israeli economist and the Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International. He served as Governor of the Bank of Israel between 1991 and 2000. Biography Frenkel was born in Mandatory Palestine. He earned a B.A. in economics and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. in 1970 with a thesis titled Money, Wealth and the Balance of Payments in a Model of Accumulation.
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Graciela Chichilnisky
#8495
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Graciela Chichilnisky is an Argentine American mathematical economist. She is a professor of economics at Columbia University and has expertise in climate change. She is also co-founder and former CEO of the company Global Thermostat.
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Mark Thornton
#5849
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mark Thornton is an American economist of the Austrian School. He has written on the topic of prohibition of drugs, the economics of the American Civil War, and the "Skyscraper Index". He is a Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute.
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Jonathan Gruber
#7861
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jonathan Holmes Gruber is an American professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate. An associate editor of both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Health Economics, Gruber has been heavily involved in crafting public health policy.
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Raymond Vernon
#5046
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Raymond Vernon was an American economist. He was a member of the group that developed the Marshall Plan after World War II and later played a role in the development of the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. He was the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, becoming emeritus on his retirement. His formulation of the Product life-cycle theory of US exports, first published in 1966, in turn influenced the behavior of companies.
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Bill Mitchell
#8990
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Francis Mitchell is a professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and Docent Professor of Global Political Economy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also a guest professor at Kyoto University, Japan since 2022. He is one of the founding developers of Modern Monetary Theory.
Go to Profile#392
Julio Rotemberg
#15050
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Julio Jacobo Rotemberg was an Argentine/American economist at Harvard Business School. He was known for his collaboration with Michael Woodford on the first New Keynesian DSGE model, especially on monopolistic competition. He was also known for an alternative model of sticky prices.
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Bernard Maris
#9989
Overall Influence
1946 - 2015 (69 years)
Bernard Henri Maris , also known as "Oncle Bernard", was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was murdered on 7 January 2015, during the shooting at the headquarters of the magazine in Paris.
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Keyu Jin
#5720
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Jin Keyu is a Chinese economist, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, specialising in international macroeconomics and the Chinese economy. Her research focuses on global trade imbalances, global asset prices and China's economic growth model.
Go to Profile#395
Philip H. Dybvig
#8356
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Philip Hallen Dybvig is an American economist. He is the Boatmen's Bancshares Professor of Banking and Finance at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis. Career Dybvig attended Indiana University and received in 1976 a BA in mathematics and physics. He then attended the economics PhD program at University of Pennsylvania for one year before transferring to Yale University, where he received the MA , MPhil , and PhD degrees in economics. His thesis, titled "Recovering additive utility functions", was supervised by Stephen A. Ross.
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Paul De Grauwe
#6027
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Paul De Grauwe is a Belgian economist and John Paulson Professor in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science as head of the European Institute. He is also professor emeritus in international economics at KU Leuven and former member of the Belgian Federal Parliament.
Go to Profile#397
Uskali Mäki
#8886
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ismo Uskali Mäki is a Finnish professor in the Department of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki. He is also director of the Trends and tensions in Intellectual Integration centre, which was recently nominated "Finnish Centre of Excellence" in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Previous posts and roles have included his being a professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam where he directed the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics and his being the editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. His main research interests lie in the met...
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Robert W. Vishny
#4831
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Robert Ward Vishny is an American economist and is the Myron S. Scholes Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Go to Profile#399
Scott E. Page
#11439
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Scott E. Page is an American social scientist and John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he has been working since 2000. He has also been director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute .
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Christoph M. Schmidt
#10494
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Christoph Matthias Schmidt is a German economist. He has been President of RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen since 2002 and also holds the Chair for Economic Policy and Applied Econometrics at the Faculty of Management and Economics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts from 2009 to 2020 and its chairman from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 he has been a member, and since 2020 co-chairman, of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. From 2011 to 2013, he was a member of the Enquete Commission "Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life" of the German Bundestag.
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