Best Economist

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) was an Austrian-American economist who coined 'creative destruction' to describe how innovation drives capitalist growth, elaborated in his 1942 work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Robert Solow (1924-2023) was an American economist known for foundational research on economic growth. The Solow growth model explains how capital accumulation, labor-force growth, and technological progress affect output over time, with sustained growth in output per worker ultimately depending on...

Daron Acemoglu is a Turkish-American economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research examines political institutions, technological change, labor markets, and economic development. He shared the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Simon Johnson and...

Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian-British economist and political thinker associated with the Austrian school of economics. He shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money, economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social,...

Paul Krugman is an American economist who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing New Trade Theory, which explains trade patterns through economies of scale rather than comparative advantage alone.

Gary Becker (1930–2014) was an American economist who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for extending economic analysis to human behavior including education, crime, and discrimination through human capital theory.

Jean Tirole is a French economist who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for his analysis of market power and regulation, providing frameworks that governments use to regulate oligopolies and platform industries.

Ronald Coase (1910–2013) was a British-born economist who spent much of his academic career in the United States and was awarded the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His 1937 essay, "The Nature of the Firm," introduced the concept of transaction costs to explain why companies exist. L...

Joseph Stiglitz is an American economist whose research examines how unequal access to information affects markets and public policy. He shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with George Akerlof and Michael Spence for analyses of markets with asymmetric information. His work has...

David Card is a Canadian-American labor economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He received half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for empirical contributions to labor economics, particularly his use of natural experiments to study minimum wages, immigr...

Robert Lucas (1937–2023) was an American economist who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for developing rational expectations theory, which transformed macroeconomics and led to the Lucas critique of policy evaluation.

Claudia Goldin is an American economist and economic historian at Harvard University whose research focuses on women, work, education, and labor-market inequality. She received the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for advancing understanding of women's labor-market outcomes across hist...

Eugene Fama is an American economist associated with the University of Chicago and known for research in financial economics. His work formulated influential versions of the efficient-market hypothesis, which examines how available information is reflected in asset prices, and helped develop empiric...

George Akerlof is an American economist known for analyzing how markets behave when participants possess unequal information. His 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons" showed how uncertainty about product quality can drive high-quality goods from a market and potentially cause trade to collapse. He sha...

Joshua Angrist is an American-Israeli economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work centers on labor economics and causal inference. He shared half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Guido Imbens for methodological contributions to the analys...

Simon Kuznets was an American economist and economic statistician born in the Russian Empire, in territory that is now Ukraine. He received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for empirically grounded interpretations of economic growth and its social structure. Kuznets made major cont...

Paul Milgrom is an American economist and Stanford University professor who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing the honor with Robert Wilson. He received the prize for his foundational improvements to auction theory and the practical design of new auction formats....

Ben Bernanke is an American economist who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for his research on banks and financial crises, and who served as Federal Reserve Chair from 2006 to 2014 during the 2008 financial crisis.

Robert Shiller is an American economist at Yale who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for his empirical work on asset price volatility, developing the CAPE ratio and providing evidence against strong market efficiency.

Esther Duflo is a French-American economist at MIT who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize for her experimental approach to poverty research and became the youngest person and second woman to win the economics Nobel.

Richard Thaler is an American economist whose work helped establish behavioral economics by applying findings from psychology to economic decision-making. He developed influential accounts of mental accounting, the endowment effect, and limited self-control, and later helped formulate the policy con...

Angus Deaton is a British-American economist born in 1945 who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized his analysis of individual consumption, poverty, and welfare across households and countries. He is well known for developing...

Harry Markowitz was an American economist whose work established modern portfolio theory as a formal approach to investment selection. In a 1952 paper, he described how investors could evaluate portfolios through expected return, variance, and covariance rather than assessing each security in isolat...

Léon Walras (1834–1910) was a French mathematical economist who served as a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is best known for developing the concept of general equilibrium theory, which he detailed in his 1874 work, "Elements of Pure Economics." By using a system of simult...

Lloyd Shapley (1923–2016) was an American mathematician and economist who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for developing cooperative game theory concepts including the Shapley value and the deferred acceptance algorithm.

Roger Myerson is an American economist whose research has made foundational contributions to game theory, mechanism design, and political economy. He shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory. T...

John Hicks (1904–1989) was a British economist who received the 1972 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Kenneth Arrow. He was recognized for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare economics. Hicks is particularly famous for formalizing the IS-LM model...

Carl Menger (1840–1921) was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economic thought. In his 1871 book, "Principles of Economics," he independently introduced the concept of marginal utility to explain how the subjective value consumers place on individual goods determines ma...

Paul Romer is an American economist known for developing central parts of endogenous growth theory. He shared the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating technological innovation into long-run macroeconomic analysis. His models treat ideas and knowledge as economic forces prod...