Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most important people in 24 academic disciplines from 4000 BCE to today

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 proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence.

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List of the most influential people in Economics, for the years 1990 – 2020

Paul Krugman

#97

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Paul Krugman is one of the most highly respected and well-known economists in the world. He is a professor emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University as well as a distinguished professor of the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D program and scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, both at Graduate Center, CUNY. Krugman’s work in examining international trade patterns and the global distribution of economic activity and resources was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008. His academic work has focused on economic geography, international finance and trade, and currency fluctuations.

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman

#21

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations.

Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz

#177

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (80 years)

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner, public policy analyst, and professor at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. in Amherst College and his Ph.D in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stiglitz is another of the most highly esteemed economists in the world, having been awarded a Nobel Prize in 2001, for his work analyzing markets with asymmetric information. His contributions to the field of economics are immeasurable. In fact, Stiglitz’s CV, with his list of publications, honors, and achievements, is over 100 pages long. He is a former chief economist and senior vice president for the World Bank.

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman

#147

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (89 years)

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist who is currently the Eugene Higgins Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus for the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He earned a B.S. in psychology from Hebrew University and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. Kahneman is world-famous for his groundbreaking work on the psychology of judgement and decision making. His studies, along with Amos Tversky, developed into prospect theory which examines behavioral economics and finance and how humans handle risk and uncertainty.

Paul Samuelson

#130

Overall Influence

1915 - 2009 (94 years)

Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considers him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".

Amartya Sen

#94

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (90 years)

Amartya Sen is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Calcutta and a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Trinity College in Cambridge. An expert in the study of welfare economics, Sen has an impressive bibliography showcasing his research and work. Having survived the Bengal famine of 1943 as a child, his interest in economics was piqued. In his work, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, he concluded that the cause of famine is not always just lack of food, it is just as often a breakdown in the distribution of available resources.

Ben Bernanke

#317

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist who served as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. After leaving the Fed, he was appointed a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave. Ber...

Kenneth Arrow

#215

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972. In economics, he was a major figure in post-World War II neo-classical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably "Arrow's impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of e...

Ronald Coase

#212

Overall Influence

1910 - 2013 (103 years)

Ronald Harry Coase was a British economist and author. Coase received a bachelor of commerce degree and a PhD from the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. Coase believed economists should study real-world wealth creation, in the manner of Adam Smith, stating, "It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ...

Richard Thaler

#651

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (78 years)

Richard Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He earned a B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Thaler has taught economics for the University of Rochester, Stanford University, the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University and, since 1995, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Thaler is an expert in behavioral economics and has published a number of books on the topic, including Quasi-ra...

Gary Becker

#405

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.

Robert Solow

#369

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (99 years)

Robert Solow is Emeritus Institute Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Solow earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Harvard University. In the middle of his studies, from 1941-1945, Solow served in the U.S. Army, deployed overseas during World War II. In 1957, Solow published an article, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function”, in which he identified hidden residuals making up roughly half of all economic growth – factors that could not be accounted for. Now known as “Solow residuals”, these residuals are now recognized as technologies and innovations crucial to growth and funded appropriately.

Jeffrey Sachs

#411

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Jeffrey Sachs is the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and professor of health policy and management for Columbia University’s School of Public Health. He completed his studies at Harvard University, earning a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D in economics. Throughout his career, Sachs has studied economic geography, macroeconomics (for which he wrote a textbook), extractive industries, public health, and economic growth. His expertise has led him to work as an economic advisor for governments seeking to move from communism to capitalism, such as Bolivia and Poland.

George Akerlof

#824

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (83 years)

George Akerlof is a university professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a B.A. degree from Yale University and a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism is Akerlof’s best-known work, examining how consumer demand for “lemon” prices among used car dealerships drives “peaches” out of the market, resulting in a market that is majority lemon and seldom yields a peach. His research eventually led to current lemon laws, in an effort to better protect consumers from larger, hidden market forces.

Andrei Shleifer

Andrei Shleifer

#1048

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (62 years)

Andrei Shleifer is a Russian-American economist and Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1991. Shleifer was awarded the biennial John Bates Clark Medal in 1999 for his seminal works in three fields: corporate finance , the economics of financial markets , and the economics of transition.

Thomas Piketty

#1007

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (52 years)

Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Paris School of Economics. He earned his Ph.D from the London School of Economics – at the age of 22, even winning an award from the French Economics Association for his thesis. Piketty is an expert in the study of economic inequality. In his research, he uses a longitudinal approach, drawing from centuries of historical data to better understand the long term impacts of various economic policies for wealth distribution. A vocal proponent for global wealth redistribution, he has concluded that systemic income inequality will never self-correct.

Arthur Laffer

#1655

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (83 years)

Arthur Betz Laffer is an American economist and author who first gained prominence during the Reagan administration as a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board . Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve, an illustration of the theory that there exists some tax rate between 0% and 100% that will result in maximum tax revenue for government. In certain circumstances, this would allow governments to cut taxes, and simultaneously increase revenue and economic growth.

Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers

#548

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot university professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School.

Greg Mankiw

#2511

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (65 years)

Greg Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a well-known macroeconomist of the New Keynesian school. He earned a B.A. in economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied law briefly at Harvard Law School before returning to become an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. Mankiw has done important study on menu costs, publishing a paper titled “Small Menu Costs and Large Business Cycles: A Macroeconomic Model of Monopoly”, which has served as the foundation for further work by economists such as Laurence Ball and David Romer.

Esther Duflo

#2208

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (51 years)

Esther Duflo is Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a B.A. from École normale supérieure in Paris, an M.A.S. from the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2019, Duflo, along with collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for their work conducting trial experiments to alleviate poverty. She is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab which, with offices across the ...

Stanley Fischer

Stanley Fischer

#1946

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (80 years)

Stanley Fischer is an Israeli American economist who served as the 20th Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2017. Fisher previously served as the 8th governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 to 2013. Born in Northern Rhodesia , he holds dual citizenship in Israel and the United States. He previously served as First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and Chief Economist of the World Bank. On January 10, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Fischer to be Vice-Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors. He is a senior advisor at Blackrock. On Sep...

Janet Yellen

#1015

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021. She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. Yellen is the first woman to hold each of those posts and the first person to have led the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department.

Cass Sunstein

#525

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (69 years)

Areas of Specialization: Administrative Law, Environmental Law and Law and Behavioral Economics Cass Sunstein is Harvard Law School’s Robert Walmsley University Professor. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Harvard University and is a scholar of constitutional law and behavioral economics. Sunstein has served multiple faculty roles, with professorships at the University of Chicago and Columbia Law School. He was nominated by President Barack Obama, and subsequently confirmed by the Senate, as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for the United States Office of Management and Budget.

Matthew Rabin

#2704

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (60 years)

Matthew Joel Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. Rabin's research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His topics of interest include errors in statistical reasoning and the evolution of beliefs, effects of choice context on exhibited preferences, reference-dependent preferences, and errors people make in inference in market and learning settings.

Herman Daly

#1377

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Herman Daly is emeritus professor of the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He earned his Ph.D from Vanderbilt University. Daly served as Senior Economist for the World Bank’s Environment Department. With collaborator John B. Cobb, he designed the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, which they recommended as a better metric of economic health or growth than Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which fails to recognize key markers of economic health. He is perhaps best known for his work as an ecological and Georgist economist, and as editor of Toward a Steady-State Economy, a seminal anthology published first in 1973, and revised in both 1980 and 1993.

Eugene Fama

#957

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (84 years)

Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis. He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2013, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Robert J. Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen. The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the 9th-most influential economist of all time based on his academic contributions, . He is regarded as "the father of modern fina...

Olivier Blanchard

Olivier Blanchard

#3005

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (75 years)

Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from September 1, 2008, to September 8, 2015. Blanchard was appointed to the position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn; he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld. He is also a Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . According to IDEAS/RePEc, he is one of the most cited economists in the world.

Vernon L. Smith

Vernon L. Smith

#854

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (96 years)

Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics. He worked to establish 'laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternat...

Thomas Sowell

#382

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (93 years)

Thomas Sowell is an American author, economist, political commentator and academic who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement and is considered one of the most influential black conservatives. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.

Hal Varian

#2851

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (76 years)

Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.

Jean Tirole

#1687

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Jean Tirole is a French professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his analysis of market power and regulation.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

#920

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (74 years)

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American economist of the Austrian School, philosopher and political theorist. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , Senior Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.

James M. Buchanan

James M. Buchanan

#493

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

James McGill Buchanan Jr. was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory originally outlined in his most famous work co-authored with Gordon Tullock in 1962, The Calculus of Consent, then developed over decades for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute as well as of the Institute of Ec...

James Heckman

#1594

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (79 years)

James Heckman is the Henry Schultz Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development, co-director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, and professor at the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College and a Ph.D in economics from Princeton University. Best known for his work on labor economics, selection bias, inequality, and human development, Heckman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The honor was bestowed for his work on the Heckman correction, that he developed to alleviate bias, or the impacts of bias from sample sets.

Richard Posner

#331

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (84 years)

Areas of Specialization: Law and Economics Richard Posner is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School who served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He earned his A.B. degree in English literature from Yale University (summa cum laude), and his LL.B. from Harvard Law School (magna cum laude and valedictorian). Posner’s background in economics informs his legal philosophy. His legal career has included a clerkship for Justice William J. Brennan, of the United States Supreme Court, a position under Thurgood Marshall, who was at the time, Solicitor General of the United States Department of Justice.

Robert P. Murphy

Robert P. Murphy

#5573

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (47 years)

Robert Patrick Murphy is an American economist. Murphy is Research Assistant Professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He has been affiliated with Laffer Associates, the Pacific Research Institute, the Institute for Energy Research , the Independent Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the Fraser Institute.

Robert J. Shiller

Robert J. Shiller

#1983

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

Robert James Shiller is an American economist, academic, and author. As of 2022, he served as a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a fellow at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance. Shiller has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980, was vice president of the American Economic Association in 2005, its president-elect for 2016, and president of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006–2007. He is also the co‑founder and chief economist of the investment management firm MacroMarkets LLC.

Robin Wells

#7134

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (64 years)

Robin Elizabeth Wells is an American economist. She is the co-author of several economics texts, mostly with her husband Paul Krugman. Life and career Wells received her BA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After obtaining her PhD degree in economics from UC Berkeley, Wells obtained a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught or done research at the University of Michigan, the University of Southampton, Stanford University, MIT, and Princeton University.

Abhijit Banerjee

Abhijit Banerjee

#2292

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (62 years)

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his B.Sc from the University of Calcutta, his M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and his Ph.D from Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, with his wife Esther Duflo (also appearing on this list). Together, they are only the sixth married couple to be awarded a Nobel Prize, which they shared with collaborator Michael Kremer in 2019. His research has focused on poverty and development. Through the Poverty Action Lab, he has conducted many experiments to determine patterns of causality between economic variables.

Paul Volcker

#584

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. was an American economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended the high levels of inflation seen in the United States throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He previously served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979.

John B. Taylor

#3449

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He taught at Columbia University from 1973 to 1980 and the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Department of Princeton University from 1980 to 1984 before returning to Stanford. He has received several teaching prizes and teaches Stanford's introductory economics course as well as PhD courses in monetary economics.

Steve Keen

#3605

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (70 years)

Steve Keen is Honorary Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow for the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security at University College London. Keen was formerly the Head of the School of Economics, History, and Politics and Professor of Economics at Kingston University. He earned a B.A. and a Bachelor of Law from the University of Sydney and a Diploma of Education from Sydney Teachers College (now University of Sydney). He then earned a Master of Commerce in economics and economic history and a Ph.D at the University of New South Wales. His work has leaned on Hyman Minsky’s financial...

Dan Ariely

#2034

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Dan Ariely is an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the founder of the research institution The Center for Advanced Hindsight, as well as the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. Ariely's TED talks have been viewed over 15 million times. Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best sellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, as well as the books Dollars and Sense, Irrationally ...

Edward C. Prescott

Edward C. Prescott

#1973

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was a...

Daron Acemoglu

#2565

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (56 years)

Daron Acemoğlu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also awarded him their highest honor, the title of Institute Professor, in 2019. He earned his B.A. from the University of York and his Ph.D from the London School of Economics. Acemoğlu’s research speciality is political economy. After earning his Ph.D at the age of 25, he went on to win the John Bates Clark Medal, that recognizes new economists. A prolific writer, he has published hundreds of works in his quest to understand the causes of poverty. In this work, he has researched economic development, network economics, human capital theory, and labor economics.

Oliver E. Williamson

Oliver E. Williamson

#1531

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Oliver Eaton Williamson was an American economist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Elinor Ostrom.

Martin Wolf

#1804

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (77 years)

Martin Harry Wolf is a British journalist of Austrian-Dutch descent who focuses on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Early life Wolf was born in London, in 1946. His father Edmund was an Austrian Jewishish playwright who escaped from Vienna to England before World War II. In London, Edmund met Wolf's mother, a Dutch Jew who had lost nearly thirty close relatives in the Holocaust. Wolf recalls that his background left him wary of political extremes and encouraged his interest in economics, as he felt economic policy mistakes were one of the root causes of World War II.

Herbert A. Simon

Herbert A. Simon

#70

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, with a Ph.D. in political science, whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.

Tyler Cowen

#1867

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (61 years)

Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education.

Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard

#169

Overall Influence

1926 - 1995 (69 years)

Murray Newton Rothbard was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement and a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.

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