The Most Influential People in History
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.
Students and researchers now have the easiest and fastest way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you ever wanted to find famous medieval biologists, or influential engineers during the industrial revolution, now you can!
We’ve also put together our own custom rankings of people by discipline. And speaking of influential people, don’t forget to check out the interviews we do with the influential people of today!
Use the power of AI for your research! Simply select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) most relevant to your research, and the time periods of interest, and get enlightening results.
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List of the most influential people in Economics, for the years 1990 – 2020
David Harvey
#898
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (88 years)
David W. Harvey is a British-born Marxist economic geographer, podcaster and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Go to ProfileBryan Caplan
#4166
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (52 years)
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
Go to ProfileDeirdre McCloskey
#1497
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (81 years)
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is the distinguished professor of economics, history, english, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago . She is also adjunct professor of philosophy and classics there, and for five years was a visiting professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctoratess. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests i...
Go to ProfileLew Rockwell
#1106
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (79 years)
Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell Jr. is an American author, editor, and political consultant. A libertarian and a self-professed anarcho-capitalist, he founded and is the chairman of the Mises Institute, a non-profit dedicated to promoting the Austrian School of economics.
Go to ProfileDani Rodrik
#2734
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (66 years)
Dani Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He earned a B.A. from Harvard University and an MPA and Ph.D from Princeton University. With his focus on global markets, equality, and social stability, he has produced numerous notable works, including Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, considered to be one of the most important books about economics to be published in the 1990s. He has identified three tensions that exist in globalization efforts – equality, conflict with norms, and social safety nets.
Go to ProfileThomas J. Sargent
#3348
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (80 years)
Thomas John Sargent is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. As of 2020, he ranks as the 29th most cited economist in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
Go to ProfileSendhil Mullainathan
#4586
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (50 years)
Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much . He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.
Go to ProfileJohn Quiggin
#3603
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (67 years)
John Quiggin is an Australian economist, a professor at the University of Queensland. He was formerly an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Federation Fellow and a member of the board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.
Go to ProfileIsrael Kirzner
#2492
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (93 years)
Israel Meir Kirzner is a British-born American economist closely identified with the Austrian School. Early life and education The son of a well-known rabbi and Talmudist, Kirzner was born in London and reached the United States by way of South Africa.
Go to ProfileJ. Bradford DeLong
#3081
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (63 years)
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong is an economic historian who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers.
Go to ProfileMartin Feldstein
#2438
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Martin Stuart Feldstein was an American economist. He was the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research . He served as president and chief executive officer of the NBER from 1978 to 2008 . From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan . Feldstein was also a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body the Group of Thirty from 2003.
Go to ProfileElinor Ostrom
#805
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Go to ProfileMyron Scholes
#924
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (82 years)
Myron Samuel Scholes is a Canadian-American financial economist. Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model. Scholes is currently the chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Capital Partners. Previously he served as the chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors board of directors, American Century Mutual Fund board of directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and limited partner at Long-Term Capital Management and a managing director at Salomon Brothers.
Go to ProfileLars Peter Hansen
#3842
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (71 years)
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Go to ProfileErnst Fehr
#6356
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (67 years)
Ernst Fehr is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality.
Go to ProfileEmmanuel Saez
#4872
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (51 years)
Emmanuel Saez is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Saez studied mathematics and economics at the École normale supérieure and earned a Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An expert in taxation and wealth distribution, Saez has published an impressive body of work relating to economic concerns of households in the United States. He has tracked household incomes for poor, middle class and rich citizens, and found that income inequality has continued to track upwards since the Great Depression. With colleague Raj Chetty, he has st...
Go to ProfileEric Maskin
#2364
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (73 years)
Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to ProfileAlan Blinder
#3700
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (78 years)
Alan Stuart Blinder is an American economics professor at Princeton University and is listed among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a leading macroeconomist, politically liberal, and a champion of Keynesian economics and policies.
Go to ProfileMichael Spence
#1467
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (80 years)
Andrew Michael Spence is a Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate. Spence is the William R. Berkley Professor in Economics and Business at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Management, Emeritus, and Dean, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Go to ProfileHa-Joon Chang
#3573
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (60 years)
Ha-Joon Chang is a reader in Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. He earned his undergraduate degree from Seoul National University, and an M.Phil and Ph.D from the University of Cambridge. He is well known for his work in institutionalist political economy, which is a study of economics that situates the economy in context with sociopolitical factors. Chang has written a number of books about heterodox economics, such as Kicking Away the Ladder, and Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. The former was awarded the Gunnar Myrda...
Go to ProfileWilliam Easterly
#3493
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (66 years)
William Easterly is co-director of New York University’s Development Research Institute and Professor of Economics. He earned his B.A. from Bowling Green State University and his Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Easterly’s research into the use of foreign aid has challenged the theories and understandings of geopolitics that inform foreign aid policy. In his work such as The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Misadventures in the Tropics, he questions...
Go to ProfileAngus Deaton
#2570
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (78 years)
Angus Deaton is a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. He earned a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his research on inequality, health, poverty, wellbeing and economic development. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015, for his work on welfare, consumption and poverty. Deeply invested in reducing poverty, he has been recognized by the Roya...
Go to ProfileAnna Schwartz
#1440
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Anna Jacobson Schwartz was an American economist who worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and a writer for The New York Times. Paul Krugman has said that Schwartz is "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars."[1]
Go to ProfilePaul Joskow
#6256
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (76 years)
Paul Lewis Joskow is an American economist and professor. He became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on January 1, 2008. He is also the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, Emeritus at MIT. He has served on the MIT faculty since 1972. From 1994 through 1998 he was Head of the MIT Department of Economics. From 1999 through 2007 he was the Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Since rejoining in 2018 from his 1988-2007 term, Professor Joskow is Research Associate on the National Bureau of Economic Research .
Go to ProfileMichael Albert
#2561
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (76 years)
Michael Albert is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts. He is known for helping to develop the socioeconomic theory of participatory economics.
Go to ProfileEdmund Phelps
#2810
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (90 years)
Edmund Strother Phelps is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations.
Go to ProfileRobert Mundell
#2406
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Robert Alexander Mundell was a Canadian economist. He was a professor of economics at Columbia University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for his pioneering work in monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas. Mundell is known as the "father" of the euro, as he laid the groundwork for its introduction through this work and helped to start the movement known as supply-side economics. Mundell was also known for the Mundell–Fleming model and Mundell–Tobin effect.
Go to ProfilePaul Romer
#2387
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (68 years)
Paul Michael Romer is an American economist and policy entrepreneur who is a University Professor in Economics at New York University. Romer is best known as the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and for co-receiving the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in endogenous growth theory. He also coined the term "mathiness," which he describes as misuse of mathematics in economic research.
Go to ProfileRobin Hahnel
#3178
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (77 years)
Robin Eric Hahnel is an American economist and professor emeritus of economics at American University. He was a professor at American University for many years and traveled extensively advising on economic matters all over the world. He is best known for his work on participatory economics with Z Magazine editor Michael Albert.
Go to ProfileDouglass North
#1733
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Douglass Cecil North was an American economist known for his work in economic history. He was the co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel "renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change."
Go to ProfileJohn Kenneth Galbraith
#324
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
John Kenneth Galbraith , also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
Go to ProfileRobert H. Frank
#5297
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (78 years)
Robert Harris Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a professor of economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He contributes to the "Economic View" column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times. Frank has published on the topic of wealth inequality in the United States.
Go to ProfileChristopher A. Pissarides
#4893
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (75 years)
Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."
Go to ProfileRaghuram Rajan
#1967
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (60 years)
Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund. From September 2013 through September 2016 he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India; in 2015, during his tenure at the RBI, he became the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements.
Go to ProfileDavid Card
#5316
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (67 years)
David Edward Card is a Canadian-American labour economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens jointly awarded the other half.
Go to ProfileFriedrich Hayek
#62
Overall Influence
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Friedrich August von Hayek , often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian–British economist, legal theorist and philosopher who is best known for his defense of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for their work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his prize.
Go to ProfileGuillermo Calvo
#9655
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (82 years)
Guillermo Antonio Calvo is an Argentine-American economist who is director of Columbia University's mid-career Program in Economic Policy Management in their School of International and Public Affairs .
Go to ProfileJustin Wolfers
#10607
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (51 years)
Justin James Michael Wolfers, born in 1972, is an Australian economist and public policy scholar. He is professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Go to ProfileJames Mirrlees
#3368
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in the 1997 Birthday Honours. Early life and education Born in Minnigaff, Kirkcudbrightshire, Mirrlees was educated at Douglas Ewart High School, then at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge . He was a very active student debater. A contemporary, Quentin Skinner, has suggested that Mirrlees was a member of the Cambridge Apostles along with fellow Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen during the period.
Go to ProfileNouriel Roubini
#3834
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (65 years)
Nouriel Roubini is chairman of Roubini Macro Associate LLC and an instructor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He earned a B.A. in political economics at Bocconi University and a Ph.D in international economics at Harvard University. He served the Clinton Administration as a senior economist and later, as a senior advisor to the Treasury Department undersecretary for international affairs, Timothy Geithner. Roubini is perhaps best well-known for being one of the few economists who foresaw the housing crash and subsequent recession in the United States. His reputation for forecasting economic crises has earned him some colorful nicknames, such as “Dr.
Go to ProfilePaul Davidson
#6342
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (93 years)
Paul Davidson is an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He is a prolific writer and has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position critical of mainstream economics.
Go to ProfileLeonid Hurwicz
#1177
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Leonid Hurwicz was a Polish-American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureates, having received the prize at the age of 90.
Go to ProfileRoger Myerson
#2782
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (72 years)
Roger Bruce Myerson is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the college. Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "h...
Go to ProfileRichard D. Wolff
#1982
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (81 years)
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I , and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Go to ProfileFranco Modigliani
#922
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Franco Modigliani was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Go to ProfileJames Tobin
#1452
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
James Tobin was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well-known tobit model.
Go to ProfileReinhard Selten
#1259
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten was a German economist, who won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences . He is also well known for his work in bounded rationality and can be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental economics.
Go to ProfileGérard Debreu
#863
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Gérard Debreu was a French-born economist and mathematician. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to ProfileJagdish Bhagwati
#2605
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (89 years)
Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-born naturalized American economist and one of the most influential trade theorists of his generation. He is a University Professor of economics and law at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has made significant contributions to international trade theory and economic development.
Go to ProfileRobert Costanza
#5441
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (73 years)
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
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