Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Economics,

#451

Richard E. Wagner

Richard E. Wagner

#10985

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Richard Edward Wagner is an American economist. He is professor emeritus of economics at George Mason University. He works primarily in the fields of public finance, public choice, and complexity economics.

#452

Xiaokai Yang

#12897

Overall Influence

1948 - 2004 (56 years)

Xiaokai Yang was a Chinese-Australian economist. He was one of the world's pre-eminent theorists in economic analysis, and an influential campaigner for democracy in China. Biography Early life Yang was born in China, the son of Chinese Communist Party officials. His parents' status meant that he initially had a privileged life, receiving an excellent education by Chinese standards at the time.

#453

Robert Z. Aliber

#17025

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Robert Zelwin Aliber is a professor emeritus of International Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his contribution to the theory of foreign direct investment. He has given the concept of foreign exchange rate in foreign direct investment. Aliber argues that a multinational corporation from hard currency area can borrow at lower rates in a soft currency country than can local firms.

#454

Timur Kuran

#2672

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

#455

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

#14338

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou is a Greek and American economist, author, and college professor. He is President of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College since its inception in 1986 and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and Executive Vice President Emeritus, at Bard College since 1977.

#456

Rachel Kranton

#11510

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rachel E. Kranton is an American economist and James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Science, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and 2010 recipient of the Blaise Pascal Chair. She was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association from 2015 to 2018. Kranton's research focuses on how social institutions affect economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, international economics, and industrial...

#457

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

#6454

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Jean-Paul Fitoussi was a French economist and sociologist of Sephardi Jewish descent. Biography Born in La Goulette, French Protectorate of Tunisia, Fitoussi earned his Ph.D. cum laude in Law and Economics from the University of Strasbourg. From 1979 until 1983, he was a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1984. He was a professor of economics at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, where he taught since 1982. He was also Professor Emeritus at LUISS "Guido Carli" University, in Rome. From 1...

#458

Neva Goodwin

#9170

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Neva Goodwin Rockefeller , known professionally as Neva Goodwin, is co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where she is a research associate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being.

#459

Roger Guesnerie

#11664

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Roger Guesnerie is an economist born in France in 1943. He is currently the Chaired Professor of Economic Theory and Social Organization of the Collège de France, Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the chairman of the board of directors of the Paris School of Economics.

#460

David Autor

#4717

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

David H. Autor is an American economist, public policy scholar, and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he also acts as co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative. Although Autor has contributed to a variety of fields in economics his research generally focuses on topics from labor economics.

#461

Lawrence E. Blume

#10558

Overall Influence

Lawrence E. Blume is the Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics and Professor of Information Science at Cornell University, US. He is a visiting research professor at IHS Vienna and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, where he has served as co-director of the economics program and on the institute's steering committee. He teaches and conducts research in general equilibrium theory and game theory, and also has research projects on natural resource management, network design, and evolutionary processes in markets and games. A Fellow of the Econometric Society, he received a BA in economics from Washington University in St.

#462

Nicholas Crafts

Nicholas Crafts

#8097

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Nicholas Francis Robert Crafts CBE was a British economist who was known for his contributions to economic history, in particular on the Industrial Revolution. He was Professor of Economic History at the University of Sussex Business School from 2019 until his death, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Warwick from 2005 to 2019, and Professor of Economic History at London School of Economics and Political Science between 1995 and 2005.

#463

Lawrence F. Katz

#9157

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lawrence Francis Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Education and career Katz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.

#464

Warren Mosler

#8870

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Warren Mosler is an American hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of the Center for Full Employment And Price Stability at University of Missouri-Kansas City. and the founder of Mosler Automotive.

#465

José Scheinkman

#11232

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

José Alexandre Scheinkman is a Brazilian economist, currently the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of Economics at Columbia University and the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics Emeritus at Princeton University. He spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, where he served as department chair immediately prior to his departure for Princeton. He is best known for his work in mathematical economics and finance, oligopoly theory and the social economics of cities and crime; he also helped spur the development of work at the intersection of economics, finance and physics. ...

#466

Steven Pressman

#12514

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Steven Pressman is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

#467

Stephen S. Roach

Stephen S. Roach

#4449

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stephen Samuel Roach is an American economist. He serves as senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and a senior lecturer at the Yale School of Management. He was formerly chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, and chief economist at Morgan Stanley, the New York City-based investment bank. In 2009, Dirk Bezemer, a Professor of Economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that Roach was one of the earliest to have predicted the 2008 global financial crisis.

#468

David A. Dodge

#9004

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

David Allison Dodge is a Canadian economist. He served as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2001 to 2008. Early life Dodge was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1943. He attended Ridley College, a private boarding school in St. Catharines , and graduated from Queen's University with an honours degree in economics. He received his Ph.D in economics from Princeton University in 1972 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The structure of earnings of Canadian accountants, engineers and scientists and the implications for returns to investment in university education."

#469

Jaroslav Vaněk

#6061

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Jaroslav Vaněk was a Czech American economist and professor emeritus of Cornell University known for his research on economics of participation and, in his earlier career, on the theory of international trade.

#470

Richard Roll

#3807

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Richard Roll is an American economist and professor of finance at UCLA, best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical. He earned his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Auburn University in 1961, and his M.B.A. in 1963 at the University of Washington while working for Boeing in Seattle, Washington. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in economics, finance, and statistics. His Ph.D. thesis, "The Behavior of Interest Rates: An Application of the Efficient Market Model to U.S.

#471

Lant Pritchett

#6864

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lant Pritchett is an American development economist. He is the RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise, Idaho. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in economics, after serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Argentina . He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 with a PhD in economics.

#472

Thomas M. Humphrey

Thomas M. Humphrey

#12385

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey was an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the bank's flagship publication, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of British classical monetary thought.

#473

Peter O. Steiner

#15341

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Peter Otto Steiner was a noted economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Michigan. His research was on a wide range of topics and he published several books including a standard textbook, and on the Economic Status of the Aged but is perhaps best remembered for his work, also jointly with Dorfman, on advertising. The Dorfman–Steiner theorem carries his name. He also served as president of the American Association of University Professors .

#474

E. Roy Weintraub

#14238

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Eliot Roy Weintraub is an American mathematician, economist, and, since 1976, professor of economics at Duke University. He was born in 1943 in New York City. Career Weintraub has published numerous articles in professional journals and other edited volumes. His teaching and research have traced the connection between mathematics and economics at technical, methodological or historical, and micro and macro levels. A broad theme of later work has been the transformation of economics from a historical to a mathematical discipline, as in General Equilibrium Analysis , Stabilizing Dynamics: Cons...

#475

Abraham Charnes

#9043

Overall Influence

1917 - 1992 (75 years)

Abraham Charnes was an American mathematician who worked in the area of operations research. Charnes published more than 200 research articles and seven books, including An Introduction to Linear Programming. His works influenced the development of Data envelopment analysis method.

#476

Ronald Findlay

#10236

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Ronald Edsel Findlay was an economist and trade theorist. He served as the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He was born in 1935 in Rangoon, then in British Burma. He and his family fled on foot from Burma to India during World War II.

#477

Sherwin Rosen

#16473

Overall Influence

1938 - 2001 (63 years)

Sherwin Rosen was an American labor economist. He had ties with many American universities and academic institutions including the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, Stanford University and its Hoover Institution. At the time of his death, Rosen was Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and president of the American Economic Association.

#478

Ray Fair

#19683

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ray Clarence Fair is the John M. Musser Professor of Economics at Yale University. Fair received his B.A. from Fresno State College in 1964 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1968. He spent several years at Princeton University before moving to Yale. He is now a professor within the Cowles Foundation and the International Center for Finance.

#479

David Prychitko

David Prychitko

#10995

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

David L. Prychitko is an American economist of the Austrian School. Prychitko is a critic of Marxism, but defends the idea of workers' self-managed firms in a freed market system. Prychitko is a tenured professor at Northern Michigan University.

#480

George S. Tolley

#16581

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

George Stanford Tolley was an agricultural economist at the University of Chicago. Along with the faculty at the University of Chicago, he has worked on the faculty of North Carolina State University. In 1965–1966, he was Director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, and in 1974–1975 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.

#481

Donald John Roberts

#12193

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Donald John Roberts is a Canadian-American economist, and John H. and Irene S. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management and International Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

#482

Emi Nakamura

#19622

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Emi Nakamura is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Nakamura is a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.

#483

Kelvin Lancaster

#16347

Overall Influence

1924 - 1999 (75 years)

Kelvin John Lancaster was an Australian mathematical economist and John Bates Clark professor of economics at Columbia University. He is best known for the development of the Theory of the Second Best with Richard Lipsey. Lancaster was also active in developing the calculus of qualitative economics, formulating the household production function, and applying the hedonic model to the estimation of housing prices.

#484

Branko Milanović

Branko Milanović

#5055

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Branko Milanović is a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality. Since January 2014, he has been a visiting presidential professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study . He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.

#485

Sho-Chieh Tsiang

#9098

Overall Influence

1918 - 1993 (75 years)

Sho-Chieh Tsiang was a Chinese-American economist. He was born in China but resided primarily in the United States from 1949 until his death. He also resided in Taiwan in 1948 and in the 1980s. He was the father-in-law of Lars Peter Hansen .

#486

Robert Sugden

#11542

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robert Sugden, FBA is an English author in the area of cognitive and behavioural economics. Professor Sugden's research combines game theory with moral and political philosophy. He is associated with the classical-liberal tradition of Hume, Mill, and Hayek.

#487

Charles L. Evans

#8721

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Charles L. Evans was the ninth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from 2007 to 2023. In that capacity, he served on the Federal Open Market Committee , the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy-making body.

#488

Andrew Samwick

#11090

Overall Influence

Andrew Alan Samwick is an American economist, who served as Chief Economist on the staff of the United States President's Council of Economic Advisors from July 2003 to July 2004. Samwick is currently Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and the director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences. He has also held teaching positions at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. In 2009, Samwick was named the New Hampshire Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is also a current editor of Economics...

#489

Peter Bofinger

#12783

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Peter Bofinger is a German economist and a former member of the German Council of Economic Experts. Career Following his studies, Bofinger worked as staff member to the Council of Economic Experts between 1978 and 1981. From 1984 until 1990, he was an economist at the Bundesbank. Since 1992, Bofinger has been a professor at the University of Würzburg. Between 1997 and 1999, he served as Dean of the university’s Department of Economics. In 1997, he turned down an offer to move to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#490

Béla Balassa

#19489

Overall Influence

1928 - 1991 (63 years)

Béla Alexander Balassa was a Hungarian economist and professor at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant for the World Bank. Balassa is best known for his work on the relationship between purchasing power parity and cross-country productivity differences . He is also known for his work on revealed comparative advantage.

#491

Katsuhito Iwai

#9679

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Katsuhito Iwai is a Japanese economist and critic. He has studied the theory of money, macro dynamics, evolutionary economics, philosophy of corporations, fiduciary law, and the history of sociology. His work includes the book, Disequilibrium Dynamics , and many articles published in academic journals. He has also written books and articles in newspapers and magazines for the general public on a wide variety of subjects ranging from global capitalism, post-modernity, civil society, money and language to literature and movies. His keen observations and analysis of the works of Shakespeare, Marx, J.

#492

J. Peter Neary

#16864

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

J. Peter Neary was an economist specialising in international trade. He was professor of economics at Oxford University, and a professorial fellow of Merton College, Oxford, as well as associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was previously professor of political economy at University College Dublin, from 1980 to 2006. He was also a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

#493

Michael Whinston

#15787

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Michael D. Whinston is an American economist and currently the Sloan Fellows Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously he was the Robert E. and Emily H. King Professor at Northwestern University and is also a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Econometric Society.

#494

Drazen Prelec

#9754

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Drazen Prelec is a professor of management science and economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and holds appointments in the Department of Economics and in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as well. He is a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics.

#495

Raj Chetty

#10262

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty is an Indian-American economist and the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance. Offered tenure at the age of 28, Chetty became one of the youngest tenured faculty in the history of Harvard's economics department. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Currently, he is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Public Economics. In 2020, he was awarded th...

#496

Klaus Schwab

#460

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Klaus Martin Schwab is a German engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum . He has acted as the WEF's chairman since founding the organisation in 1971. Early life and education Klaus Martin Schwab was born on March 30, 1938, to Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht in Ravensburg. His parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss AG, an industrial company and contractor for the Nazi regime. Schwab's family was monitored by the Gestapo, which in 1944 also interrogated his mother for speaking with a Swiss accent in public.

#497

Guido Tabellini

#9567

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Guido Enrico Tabellini is an Italian economist, rector of Bocconi University from November 2008 until July 2012. Tabellini received his Laurea in 1980 from the University of Turin, and his Ph.D. in 1984 from UCLA. He first taught at Stanford, then at UCLA, and later in Italy. He is past president of the European Economic Association. He was consultant to the World Bank and Italian government.

#498

Karl Shell

#18259

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Karl Shell is an American theoretical economist, specializing in macroeconomics and monetary economics. Shell received an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1960. He earned his Ph.D. in economics in 1965 at Stanford University, where he studied under Nobel Prize in Economics winner Kenneth Arrow and Hirofumi Uzawa.

#499

Henry Rosovsky

#4114

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Henry Rosovsky was an American economist and academic administrator who served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. Following a career as an economic historian specializing in East Asia, Rosovsky was named Dean in 1973 by Harvard President Derek Bok. He served from 1973 to 1984 and, again, in 1990 to 1991. He also served as Acting President of Harvard in 1984 and 1987. In 1985, Rosovsky became a member of Harvard’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, until 1997. He was the first Harvard faculty member to do so in a century.

#500

Tim Besley

#12027

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sir Timothy John Besley, is a British academic economist who is the School Professor of Economics and Political Science and Sir W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics at the London School of Economics .

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