Major Thinkers in Economics

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Top Figures in Economics

While writing my core economics series and supply-side economics critique, I thought it would be good to actually specify who the most influential economists have been within the profession. There is a huge gap between how modern economics is practiced versus the folk economic narratives non-economists tell themselves. Very often, people conflate their surface level readings of political economy, with how economists actually talk and make recommendations about policy. For example, someone may read Hayek or Marx, thinking they’ve figured everything out. While these thinkers are not inconsequential, they’re just not revered or mentioned too often by practicing economists unless the economist specializes in the history of economic thought. This is not to say that people like Marshall or Keyenes are irrelevant; they’re just simply embedded within the discipline in non-obvious ways. Therefore, in this post I want to list some of the most influential economists within the past 100 years or so, describing their contributions. These thinkers are significant in that they have very much shaped how economics is understood and practiced.

Most Impactful Thinkers and Subfield Breakdown

  1. John von Neumann — Expected utility foundations; early game-theoretic and equilibrium reasoning; made rigorous math methods “allowed” in econ.

    • What he changed: Made formal choice under uncertainty and (with Morgenstern) strategic interaction legitimate, rigorous objects in economics.
    • Signature tool: von Neumann–Morgenstern (VNM) expected utility; game-theoretic reasoning.
    • Fields impacted: decision theory, finance, mechanism design, IO, political economy.
    • Failure modes: Expected utility can be descriptively wrong; people violate independence/consistency (later behavioral econ built on this gap).
    • Start reading: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) (with Morgenstern).
    • Links:

  2. Oskar Morgenstern — Co-founded game theory in economics (with von Neumann); strategic interaction became a core object.

    • What he changed: Helped transform “strategy” into a formal analytic object, not just narrative history.
    • Signature tool: game theory as an economic method.
    • Fields impacted: bargaining, oligopoly, political economy, market design foundations.
    • Failure modes: Early game theory wasn’t always predictive without equilibrium selection; later refinements (Selten, etc.) addressed this.
    • Start reading: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944).
    • Links:

  3. Paul Samuelson — Optimization/comparative statics as the default language of theory; unified micro/macro style of modeling.

  4. Kenneth Arrow — General equilibrium + welfare theorems; social choice; modern micro’s logical backbone.

  5. Gérard Debreu — Axiomatic general equilibrium (existence/rigor); made proof-based micro theory mainstream.

    • What he changed: Turned GE into a fully rigorous axiomatic system; cemented the “existence/optimality under conditions” proof style.
    • Signature tool: axiomatic general equilibrium; topological methods.
    • Fields impacted: micro theory, welfare, later mechanism design and contract theory (via formal methods).
    • Failure modes: Rigor can drift into irrelevance; models may be internally consistent but externally thin.
    • Start reading: Theory of Value (1959). ( Wikipedia)
    • Links:

  6. John Nash — Nash equilibrium: the default solution concept across micro/IO/political economy/contracting.

  7. John Harsanyi — Bayesian games; incomplete information and “types” became standard.

    • What he changed: Made private information tractable by modeling types and beliefs, enabling Bayesian equilibrium analysis.
    • Signature tool: Bayesian games.
    • Fields impacted: auctions, IO, political economy, mechanism design, contract theory.
    • Failure modes: Off-path beliefs and equilibrium multiplicity; hard-to-test informational assumptions.
    • Start reading: Overview via Bayesian game concept + Harsanyi transformation.
    • Links:

  8. Reinhard Selten — Refinements (subgame perfection, etc.); disciplined equilibrium selection in dynamic games.

    • What he changed: Developed equilibrium refinements that rule out non-credible threats.
    • Signature tool: subgame perfection / trembling-hand perfection (refinement logic).
    • Fields impacted: dynamic IO, bargaining, regulation, macro/policy credibility.
    • Failure modes: Refinement dependence; which refinement you choose can decide the result.
    • Start reading: Selten’s work on perfectness (1970s).
    • Links:

  9. Leonid Hurwicz — Mechanism design: institutions as “games” that implement outcomes.

  10. Eric Maskin — Implementation theory; formal conditions for what can/can’t be achieved by rules/mechanisms.

  11. Roger Myerson — Unified mechanism design/auctions; incentive compatibility as a central tool.

  12. George Akerlof — Adverse selection (“lemons”); market failure from private information became a workhorse idea.

  13. Michael Spence — Signaling; equilibrium with unobservable quality became a standard applied move.

  14. Joseph Stiglitz — Screening/information economics; pervasive role of info frictions in markets and policy.

    • What he changed: Made information economics a general-purpose lens (screening, credit rationing, efficiency wages, etc.).
    • Signature tool: screening and equilibrium with information frictions.
    • Fields impacted: IO, labor, public economics, development, macro/finance.
    • Failure modes: Many equilibria; institutional details matter; easy to “explain anything” post hoc.
    • Start reading: Entry points are his screening and information papers (plus Nobel lectures).
    • Links:

  15. James Mirrlees — Optimal taxation under private information; modern public finance became incentive-based.

  16. William Vickrey — Auction/incentive ideas; foundations for modern auctions and design.

    • What he changed: Laid foundations for modern auction theory and truthful mechanisms.
    • Signature tool: Vickrey (second-price) auction logic; incentive compatibility intuition.
    • Fields impacted: market design, procurement, spectrum auctions, platform ad auctions.
    • Failure modes: Common-value settings break naive intuition; collusion and entry are pivotal.
    • Start reading: “Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders” (1961).
    • Links:

  17. Ronald Coase — Transaction costs, firm boundaries, property rights logic; institutions entered mainstream price theory.

  18. Douglass North — Institutions and long-run growth; made institutions central in development/economic history.

  19. Trygve Haavelmo — Probability foundations for econometrics; linked models to inference (modern identification thinking’s ancestor).

  20. Daniel McFadden — Discrete choice / random utility; transformed applied micro, IO, transport, labor, marketing.

  21. James Heckman — Selection bias and treatment effects; modern program evaluation and structural labor econometrics.

  22. Donald Rubin — Potential outcomes; clarified causal effects and the logic of experiments/quasi-experiments.

  23. Joshua Angrist — Credible quasi-experimental designs; IV as research design; shifted applied standards.

  24. Guido Imbens — LATE + modern causal inference toolkit; formalized what IV identifies.

  25. David Card — Natural experiments in labor; made design-based empirical work mainstream.

  26. Robert Lucas — Rational expectations + Lucas critique; changed macro’s standards for policy evaluation.

  27. Finn Kydland — Time inconsistency; rules vs discretion; credibility became formal in macro policy.

    • What he changed: Put credibility at the center of policy analysis: even a well-intended policymaker can create bad outcomes if private agents expect future re-optimization and adjust today.
    • Signature tool: Time inconsistency framework; rules vs discretion (credible commitment as an equilibrium constraint). ( JSTOR)
    • Fields impacted: monetary policy, fiscal policy, central banking/institutions, DSGE policy evaluation.
    • Failure modes: “Rules” can be too rigid under structural change; credibility emphasis can underweight stabilization needs during rare crises.
    • Start reading: “Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans” (1977). ( JSTOR)
    • Links:

  28. Edward Prescott — RBC/DSGE computational macro; quantitative equilibrium modeling became default.

  29. Clive Granger — Time-series causality + forecasting; changed applied macro/finance econometrics practice.

    • What he changed: Made “causality” operational for time series via predictability: if lagged (X) improves forecasts of (Y) beyond lagged (Y), then (X) Granger-causes (Y). This became a default empirical diagnostic in dynamic data.
    • Signature tool: Granger causality; forecasting-based evaluation of dynamic relationships. ( JSTOR)
    • Fields impacted: macro empirics, finance, forecasting, applied econometrics with time series/panels.
    • Failure modes: Frequently misinterpreted as true structural causality; sensitive to omitted variables, lag choices, nonstationarity/cointegration, and regime shifts.
    • Start reading: “Investigating Causal Relations by Econometric Models and Cross-Spectral Methods” (1969). ( JSTOR)
    • Links:

  30. Christopher Sims — VARs; pragmatic dynamic empirical macro without fully specified structural systems.

    • What he changed: Gave macroeconomists a credible way to study dynamics with fewer heroic assumptions: VARs treat the economy as a joint evolving system and let data summarize responses to innovations, rather than forcing full structural systems up front. ( JSTOR)
    • Signature tool: VAR/SVAR; impulse responses + variance decompositions; identification via explicit restrictions (short-run, long-run, sign, narrative, etc.). ( JSTOR)
    • Fields impacted: monetary policy empirics, macro forecasting, international macro/finance, applied time-series methods.
    • Failure modes: Identification can be fragile/assumption-driven; VARs can drift under regime change; “innovation” ≠ clean policy shock without strong design.
    • Start reading: “Macroeconomics and Reality” (1980). ( JSTOR)
    • Links:

  31. Thomas Schelling — coordination, commitment, focal points

    • What he changed: Showed how strategic outcomes hinge on coordination devices, commitments, and focal points—not just price-taking.
    • Signature tool: coordination games as social science; strategic commitment.
    • Fields impacted: conflict, bargaining, institutions, macro credibility narratives.
    • Failure modes: Harder to formalize/estimate; can become “storytelling” if not disciplined.
    • Start reading: The Strategy of Conflict (1960).
    • Links:

  32. Bengt Holmström — moral hazard and incentives

  33. Oliver Hart — incomplete contracts and control

    • What he changed: Showed how ownership allocates residual control rights when contracts can’t specify everything.
    • Signature tool: property-rights / incomplete-contracts theory of the firm.
    • Fields impacted: corporate governance, privatization, vertical integration, institutions.
    • Failure modes: Hard to map “control” to measurable variables; multiple institutional margins left out.
    • Start reading: The Grossman–Hart / Hart–Moore property-rights lineage (plus Hart’s book).
    • Links:

  34. Elinor Ostrom — governing the commons beyond state vs market

  35. Amartya Sen — capabilities + social choice; broadened welfare economics beyond income/utility to freedoms and functionings.

Here is a breakdown by general field. Modern economics isn’t just one theory; it’s a toolkit. The most influential economists of the last ~100 years are the ones who:

  1. changed the modeling grammar (optimization, equilibrium, incentives, expectations),
  2. changed the rules of evidence (causal inference, identification), or
  3. turned economics into engineering (mechanism/market design).

A) Micro theory, general equilibrium, and welfare

  • Lionel McKenzie — General equilibrium existence results alongside Arrow–Debreu tradition.
  • Tjalling Koopmans — Activity analysis; optimization and measurement; Cowles-style modeling.
  • Abba Lerner — Functional finance and welfare/economic policy logic (pricing, efficiency).
  • Amartya Sen — Social choice/welfare beyond utility; rights, capabilities; broadened normative econ.
  • Gerard Debreu / Arrow / Samuelson — the proof-and-optimization style that defines modern micro.

B) Game theory and strategic interaction

  • Robert Aumann — Common knowledge; correlated equilibrium; foundations of rationality in games.
  • Thomas Schelling — Coordination, focal points, credible commitment; strategy beyond formal equilibrium mechanics.
  • Lloyd Shapley — Cooperative game theory; Shapley value; plus matching foundations (with Gale).
  • Ariel Rubinstein — Bargaining theory as a tractable workhorse (alternating-offers).
  • Drew Fudenberg & Jean Tirole — Dynamic games as a usable applied toolkit (reputation, repeated games).
  • David Kreps — Foundations/refinements; bounded rationality ideas inside formal models.

C) Information economics and incentive theory (adverse selection, moral hazard)

  • Michael Rothschild & Joseph Stiglitz — Competitive insurance with adverse selection; canonical screening logic.
  • Sanford Grossman — Information in markets; incentive/contracting foundations (and firm theory linkages).
  • Bengt Holmström — Principal–agent, multitask incentives; modern contract theory’s “default” assumptions.
  • Oliver Hart — Incomplete contracts; control rights; why firms exist and how governance works.
  • Jean-Jacques Laffont — Incentives in regulation/public economics; bridged theory with policy.
  • Edward Lazear — Personnel economics: incentives and organizations in a tractable micro framework.

D) Mechanism design, market design, and auctions

  • Alvin Roth — Matching and market design in practice (kidney exchange, school choice): economics as engineering.
  • Paul Milgrom — Auction design + information; practical spectrum auctions and auction theory toolkit.
  • Robert Wilson — Auction theory under uncertainty; foundations of common-value auctions.
  • Gale & Shapley — Stable matching; the algorithmic backbone of matching markets.
  • Hurwicz / Maskin / Myerson / Vickrey — (above) the incentive-compatibility core.

E) Industrial organization, regulation, and antitrust-style micro

  • Jean Tirole — Modern IO/regulation: strategic pricing, entry, vertical restraints, platforms; benchmark models.
  • Avinash Dixit — Entry deterrence/strategic trade style; clean models of oligopoly strategy.
  • Carl Shapiro — IO of innovation and antitrust; network effects and competition policy logic.
  • Richard Gilbert — Innovation, patents, and competition; IO-policy interface.
  • Steven Salop — Spatial competition and antitrust; practical theoretical tools for market power.
  • Berry, Levinsohn & Pakes (BLP) — Empirical IO demand estimation framework; quantitative IO became standard.

F) Labor, search, and matching (micro + macro bridge)

  • Peter Diamond — Search frictions; wage setting and unemployment mechanisms.
  • Dale Mortensen — Matching/search; equilibrium unemployment as a frictional outcome.
  • Christopher Pissarides — DMP framework; macro-labor integration.
  • Gary Becker — Human capital, family economics, discrimination; expanded micro’s domain and empirical targets.
  • Jacob Mincer — Earnings function; core empirical labor specification.
  • Alan Krueger — Applied labor and policy evaluation; helped normalize modern applied practice.

G) Public finance and political economy

  • Anthony Atkinson — Inequality measurement and modern public economics.
  • Joseph Stiglitz — Public finance under info frictions (also above).
  • Peter Diamond & James Mirrlees — Production efficiency in optimal taxation (classic result shaping optimal tax theory).
  • Mancur Olson — Collective action; political economy of groups and growth.
  • James Buchanan — Public choice: incentives inside politics and government.
  • Elinor Ostrom — Governance of commons; institutions as diverse, empirically grounded arrangements.

H) Development economics and growth (theory + empirics)

  • Robert Solow — Neoclassical growth and growth accounting; baseline for growth empirics.
  • Paul Romer — Endogenous growth via ideas; innovation became a formal engine.
  • Philippe Aghion & Peter Howitt — Schumpeterian growth; creative destruction as a workhorse framework.
  • Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James Robinson — Institutions as causal drivers of development in mainstream empirical style.
  • Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Kremer — RCT movement in development; experiments became a central empirical method.
  • Angus Deaton — Measurement, consumption, health, and skepticism about naive causal claims; raised empirical standards.
  • Hernando de Soto (more policy-influential than method-defining) — Property rights emphasis in development debates.

I) International trade and economic geography

  • Paul Krugman — Increasing returns/monopolistic competition in trade; “new trade” and geography became standard.
  • Elhanan Helpman — Trade with imperfect competition, FDI; formal integration of trade and macro ideas.
  • Marc Melitz — Firm heterogeneity; the dominant modern trade workhorse model.
  • Gene Grossman — Trade, innovation, political economy; deepened modern trade frameworks.
  • Arkolakis, Costinot, Rodríguez-Clare — “Sufficient statistics” and modern welfare gains-from-trade quantification.

J) Macroeconomics: expectations, DSGE, monetary policy

  • John Maynard Keynes — Aggregate demand focus; macro stabilization as a central policy problem.
  • Milton Friedman — Natural rate, expectations-augmented Phillips curve logic, permanent income; reshaped macro empirics and policy arguments.
  • Edmund Phelps — Expectations and inflation/unemployment tradeoff; microfoundations of the Phillips curve.
  • Thomas Sargent — Rational expectations methods + macro policy; dynamic macro as a discipline.
  • Robert Barro — Ricardian equivalence and macro-fiscal debates in model form.
  • Michael Woodford — New Keynesian DSGE and interest-rate rules; modern monetary theory baseline.
  • Olivier Blanchard — Practical DSGE/macro synthesis; helped set empirical/theoretical standards.
  • Robert Hall — Consumption, labor market dynamics; influential empirical macro/labor bridge.

K) Time series, econometrics foundations, and “default standard errors”

  • Ragnar Frisch & Jan Tinbergen — Early econometrics as a field; modeling + measurement as a joint project.
  • Lawrence Klein — Structural macro econometric models; mid-century applied macro practice.
  • Robert Engle — Volatility (ARCH); finance and macro time series transformed.
  • Lars Peter Hansen — GMM; moment-based estimation became standard.
  • Halbert White — Robust SEs; default applied practice changed.
  • Newey & West — HAC SEs; core for time series/panels.
  • Arellano & Bond — Dynamic panel GMM; practical method for micro panels with endogeneity.
  • Peter Phillips — Unit roots/cointegration asymptotics; modern macro/finance time series theory.
  • James Stock & Mark Watson — Applied macroeconometrics, forecasting, factor models; practical standards.

L) Causal inference and the applied micro “credibility revolution” (beyond the top 30)

  • Orley Ashenfelter — Difference-in-differences and applied labor evaluation tradition.
  • Susan Athey — Modern causal inference + IO/market design; ML-informed econometrics in practice.
  • Guido Imbens / Angrist / Card — (above) set the norms for credible identification.
  • Charles Manski — Partial identification/bounds; “assumption transparency.”
  • Paul Rosenbaum — Sensitivity analysis; how robust are causal claims?
  • Don Andrews — Econometric theory for inference/identification in modern models.

M) Behavioral economics and experiments

  • Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky — Prospect theory; heuristics/biases; changed what “preferences” can look like in applied work.
  • Richard Thaler — Behavioral public econ and nudges; made behavioral insights policy-relevant.
  • Matthew Rabin — Behavioral ideas embedded in formal micro models economists actually use.
  • Vernon Smith — Lab experiments as evidence; markets tested, not just assumed.
  • John List — Field experiments; experimental methods moved into “real-world” settings.
  • Colin Camerer — Behavioral game theory; empirical discipline for strategic behavior.

N) Finance and asset pricing

  • Harry Markowitz — Mean-variance portfolio theory; made risk quantifiable and operational.
  • William Sharpe — CAPM; baseline asset pricing and cost of capital.
  • Eugene Fama — Efficient markets; disciplined empirical tests of predictability.
  • Robert Shiller — Excess volatility, behavioral finance; expectations data mattered.
  • Black–Scholes–Merton (Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton) — Option pricing; stochastic calculus in finance; huge methodological spillovers.
  • Kenneth French (with Fama) — Empirical factor models; changed what “explaining returns” means.

O) Economists who changed computation / quantitative practice

  • Herbert Simon — Bounded rationality; organizations; influenced behavioral and decision theory in econ.
  • Edward Denison — Growth accounting measurement tradition (method + data discipline).
  • Eugene Fama / Sims / Hansen — In practice, pushed economists toward “toolkit econometrics” for real data.

Readings

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