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,
#401
Drew Fudenberg
#9820
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Drew Fudenberg is a Professor of Economics at MIT. His extensive research spans many aspects of game theory, including equilibrium theory, learning in games, evolutionary game theory, and many applications to other fields. Fudenberg was also one of the first to apply game theoretic analysis in industrial organization, bargaining theory, and contract theory. He has also authored papers on repeated games, reputation effects, and behavioral economics.
Go to Profile#402
Anthony Venables
#11415
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Anthony James Venables, CBE, , is a British economist and the BP Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford. Venables is known as one of the pioneers of New economic geography. He co-authored along with Paul Krugman and Masahisa Fujita the influential book The Spatial Economy - Cities, Regions and International Trade .
Go to Profile#403
Laurence M. Ball
#17288
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Laurence M. Ball is an American economist, Professor and Chairman of the Economics Department at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a specialist in the field of macroeconomics .
Go to Profile#404
W. Brian Arthur
#3474
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
William Brian Arthur is a Belfast-born economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets. He has been on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC. He is credited with the invention of the El Farol Bar problem.
Go to Profile#405
Edith Penrose
#5487
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Edith Elura Tilton Penrose was an American-born British economist whose best known work is The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, which describes the ways which firms grow and how fast they do. Writing in The Independent, the economist Sir Alec Cairncross stated that the book brought Dr. Penrose "instant recognition as a creative thinker, and its importance to the analysis of the job of management has been increasingly realized".
Go to Profile#406
Anwar Shaikh
#8998
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anwar M. Shaikh is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics. He is Professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1972.
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James Duesenberry
#11187
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
James Stemble Duesenberry was an American economist. He made a significant contribution to the Keynesian analysis of income and employment with his 1949 doctoral thesis Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.
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Peter Navarro
#3412
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Kent Navarro is an American political figure who served in the Trump administration as the Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. He previously served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House National Trade Council, a newly created entity in the White House Office, until it was folded into the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, a new role established by executive order in April 2017. He is also a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the Paul M...
Go to Profile#409
Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford
#5117
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, is a British economist, banker, and academic. He is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government and Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics , and 2010 Professor of Collège de France. He was President of the British Academy from 2013 to 2017, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.
Go to Profile#410
Carlota Perez
#6358
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Carlota Perez is a British-Venezuelan scholar specialized in technology and socio-economic development. She researches the concept of Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and the theory of great surges, a further development of Schumpeter's work on Kondratieff waves. In 2012 she was awarded the Silver Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation and in 2021 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#411
Andre Gunder Frank
#1597
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Go to Profile#412
Frank J. Fabozzi
#5228
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Frank J. Fabozzi is an American economist, educator, writer, and investor, currently Professor of Practice at The Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and a Member of Edhec Risk Institute. He was previously a Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School, Professor in the Practice of Finance and Becton Fellow in the Yale School of Management, and a Visiting Professor of Finance at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has authored and edited many books, three of which were coauthored with Nobel laureates, Franco Modigliani and Harry Markowitz.
Go to Profile#413
Bernd Lucke
#5020
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bernd Lucke is a German economist and politician. Lucke was elected a Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative für Deutschland in 2014. He failed to win reelection in 2019. He is a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, a co-founder of Wahlalternative 2013 , and a founder of the party Alternative for Germany . Lucke lost the leadership of the AfD to Frauke Petry in July 2015. Petry's election was considered a shift of the party to extremist positions; Lucke subsequently left the party. In July 2015 he and other former AfD members founded the political party Libera...
Go to Profile#414
Peter Howitt
#11424
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Peter Wilkinson Howitt is a Canadian economist. He is the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University. Howitt is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1994 and a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada since 1992. He served as president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1993–1994 and was the editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking in the period 1997–2000. For 2019 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics.
Go to Profile#415
Joel Slemrod
#9306
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joel Brian Slemrod is an American economist and academic, currently serving as a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and the Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#416
Stephen Ziliak
#15010
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Stephen T. Ziliak is an American professor of economics whose research and essays span disciplines from statistics and beer brewing to medicine and poetry. He is currently a faculty member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, conjoint professor of business and law at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and professor of economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL. He previously taught for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and Bowling Green State University. Much of his work has focused on welfare and poverty, rhetoric, public policy, and the history and philosophy of science and statistics.
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Daniel Ellsberg
#282
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.
Go to Profile#418
Lawrence H. White
#6330
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lawrence Henry White is an American economics professor at George Mason University who teaches graduate level monetary theory and policy. He is considered an authority on the history and theory of free banking. His writings support the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the promotion of private and competitive banking.
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Kate Raworth
#10458
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Kate Raworth is an English economist known for "doughnut economics", an economic model that balances between essential human needs and planetary boundaries. Raworth is senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and a Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
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Edward Glaeser
#7359
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Edward Ludwig Glaeser is an American economist who is currently the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He is also Director for the Cities Research Programme at the International Growth Centre.
Go to Profile#421
Tim Bollerslev
#13847
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Tim Peter Bollerslev is a Danish economist, currently the Juanita and Clifton Kreps Professor of Economics at Duke University. A fellow of the Econometric Society, Bollerslev is known for his ideas for measuring and forecasting financial market volatility and for the GARCH model.
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Edwin Mansfield
#23305
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Edwin Mansfield was a professor of economics at University of Pennsylvania from 1964 and until his death. From 1985 he was also a director of the Center for Economics and Technology. Edwin Mansfield is best known for his scientific results concerning technological change / diffusion of innovations, and also for his textbooks on microeconomics, managerial economics, and econometrics that were published in millions copies and translated into foreign languages.
Go to Profile#423
Robert W. Clower
#20397
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Robert Wayne Clower was an American economist. He is credited with having largely created the field of stock-flow analysis in economics and with seminal works on the micro-foundations of monetary theory and macroeconomics.
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Edward Luttwak
#3135
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Edward Nicolae Luttwak is an American author known for his works on grand strategy, military strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. He is best known for being the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and ten other languages, is widely used at war colleges around the world. His books are currently published in 29 languages besides English.
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James H. Stock
#12637
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Harold Stock is an American economist, professor of economics, and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University. He is co-author of Introduction to Econometrics, a leading undergraduate textbook, and co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Stock served as a Chair of the Harvard Economics Department from 2007 to 2009 and as a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2014.
Go to Profile#426
Arnold Kling
#8961
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Arnold Kling is an American economist, scholar, and blogger known for his writings on EconLog, an economics blog, along with Bryan Caplan and David R. Henderson. Kling also has his own blog, askblog, which carries the motto: "taking the most charitable views of those who disagree." The "ask" in askblog stands for "Arnold S. Kling." He is an Adjunct Scholar for the Cato Institute and is affiliated with the Mercatus Center.
Go to Profile#427
Howard Raiffa
#4388
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Howard Raiffa was an American academic who was the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics, a joint chair held by the Business School and Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was an influential Bayesian decision theorist and pioneer in the field of decision analysis, with works in statistical decision theory, game theory, behavioral decision theory, risk analysis, and negotiation analysis. He helped found and was the first director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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Urs Fischbacher
#10630
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Urs Fischbacher is a Swiss economist and professor of applied economic research at the University of Konstanz. He is director of the Thurgau Economic Institute, an affiliated institute of the University of Konstanz. He pioneered the field of software tools for experimental economics.
Go to Profile#429
Masahisa Fujita
#12805
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Masahisa Fujita is a Japanese economist who has studied regional science and Urban economics and International Trade, Spatial Economy . He is a professor at Konan University and an adjunct professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#430
David M. Kreps
#10013
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Marc "Dave" Kreps is a game theorist and economist and professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University . The Stanford University Department of Economics appointed Kreps the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management. He is known for his analysis of dynamic choice models and non-cooperative game theory, particularly the idea of sequential equilibrium, which he developed with Stanford Business School colleague Robert B. Wilson.
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Erik S. Reinert
#7718
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Erik Steenfeldt Reinert is a Norwegian economist, with development economics, economic history and history of economic policy as his specialties. Biography Reinert was born in Oslo, attended the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland , Harvard University , and Cornell University . Already during his studies, he spent time in Latin America, working with a community development project in the Peruvian Andes, as well as in private industry. In 1972 he founded and later developed a small industrial firm, Matherson-Selig, in Bergamo, Italy. Adding production plants also in Norway and Finland, the company had become the largest of its kind in Europe when Reinert sold it in 1991.
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Thomas C. Leonard
#5755
Overall Influence
Thomas C. Leonard is a historian of economics and scholarly authority on American economic life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries at Princeton. He is perhaps best known for his book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. In 2017, the History of Economics Society awarded Illiberal Reformers the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for book of the year.
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Walter Krämer
#12313
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Walter Krämer is a German economist. He is a professor for economic and social statistics at the Technical University of Dortmund. Biography Krämer studied mathematics and economics at the University of Mainz where he was conferred 1979 a doctorate. He qualified as a university lecturer in econometrics at the Vienna University of Technology. He has been a professor of economic and social statistics at the Technical University of Dortmund since 1988. In addition, he was active as a guest professor at the Management Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai.
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Sam Peltzman
#7511
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Sam Peltzman is professor emeritus at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. He is an editor of The Journal of Law and Economics and was editor of the Journal of Political Economy from 1974 till 1989. Peltzman’s research has focused on issues related to the interface between the public sector and the private economy. His published work includes numerous articles in academic journals.
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Eswar Prasad
#12399
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eswar Shanker Prasad is an Indian-American economist. He is the Tolani Senior Professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in Economics.
Go to Profile#436
Ottmar Edenhofer
#9506
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ottmar Georg Edenhofer is a German economist who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on climate change policy, environmental and energy policy, and energy economics. His work has been heavily cited. Edenhofer currently holds the professorship of the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin. Together with Earth scientist Johan Rockström, economist Ottmar Edenhofer is scientific director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research , representing the interdisciplinary and solutions-oriented approach of the institute. Furthermore, he is director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change .
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Konstantin Sonin
#8794
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Konstantin Sonin is a Russian economist. He is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research , London, and an associate research fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. In recognition for his outstanding research in the field of political economy, in December 2015, he was named the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#438
Erik Brynjolfsson
#3229
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Erik Brynjolfsson is an American academic, author and inventor. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University where he directs the Digital Economy Lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, with appointments at SIEPR, the Stanford Department of Economics and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a best-selling author of several books. He is known for his contributions to the world of IT productivity research and work on the economics of information and t...
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Aldo Rustichini
#10165
Overall Influence
Aldo Rustichini is an Italian-born American economist, academic and researcher. He is a professor of economics at University of Minnesota, where is also associated with the Interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Sciences.
Go to Profile#440
Jayati Ghosh
#6059
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jayati Ghosh is an Indian development economist. She is the Chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her core areas of study include international economics, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.
Go to Profile#441
Jean-Jacques Laffont
#10873
Overall Influence
1947 - 2004 (57 years)
Jean-Jacques Marcel Laffont was a French economist specializing in public economics and information economics. Educated at the University of Toulouse and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris, he was awarded PhD in economics by Harvard University in 1975.
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Halbert White
#14856
Overall Influence
1950 - 2012 (62 years)
Halbert Lynn White Jr. was the Chancellor’s Associates Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#443
Gene Grossman
#11727
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gene Michael Grossman is an American economist who is the Jacob Viner Professor of International Economics at Princeton University. He is known for his research on international trade, in large part focusing on the relationship between economic growth and trade and the political economy of trade policy. He is also known for his work on the environmental Kuznets curve.
Go to Profile#444
Danny Quah
#11065
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Quah's work includes contributions to the fields of economic growth, development economics, monetary economics, macroeconometrics, and the weightless economy. Quah is best known for his research on estimation techniques for disentangling the effects of different disturbances on economies, for his studies on economic growth and convergence across nation states, and for his analyses of large-scale shifts in the global economy. Quah became the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew...
Go to Profile#445
Yoram Barzel
#14606
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Yoram Barzel was an Israeli economist and a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington. He was interested in property rights, applied price theory, and political economy.
Go to Profile#446
Madsen Pirie
#4791
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Duncan Madsen Pirie is a British researcher and author. He is a co-founder and current President of the Adam Smith Institute, a UK neoliberal think tank which has been in operation since 1977. Early life and education Born in Hull, Pirie is the son of Douglas Pirie and Eva Madsen. As a child he attended the Humberstone Foundation School in Old Clee, Lincolnshire.
Go to Profile#447
Donald J. Harris
#8959
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Donald Jasper Harris is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics. He is the father of the 49th and current vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, as well as of her sister, lawyer and political commentator Maya Harris.
Go to Profile#448
Preston McAfee
#12142
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Randolph Preston McAfee is an American economist and distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he served as chief economist at Microsoft. He has also served as an economist at Google, vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the executive officer for the social sciences. He has taught business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics.
Go to Profile#449
Francesco Giavazzi
#4926
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Francesco Giavazzi is an Italian economist. He is Professor of Economics at Bocconi University and a regular visiting professor at MIT. Biography Giavazzi graduated in electrical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano university in 1972 and obtained a PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 under the supervision of Rudi Dornbusch.
Go to Profile#450
John R. Meyer
#11754
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
John Robert Meyer was an American economist and educator. Meyer is credited with creating the field of transport economics and was one of the pioneers of cliometrics. Career Born in Pasco, Meyer attended Pacific University from 1945 to 1946, after which he served in the United States Naval Reserve from 1945 to 1948. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington in 1950, and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1955. His dissertation topic coincided with that of a Harvard classmate, Edwin Kuh, leading them to merge both papers and publish it as The Investment Decision: ...
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