Economics

Ideas about markets, work, and resources.

People in Economics

51 profiles

Economist

John Maynard Keynes

Explaining how weak spending can keep an economy in a slump.

Economist

Amartya Sen

Changing how economists understand poverty, famine and the freedom to live a better life.

Economist

Abhijit Banerjee

Using field experiments to test what actually helps people escape poverty.

Economist

Esther Duflo

Testing anti-poverty programmes through field experiments in real communities.

Economist

Claudia Goldin

Explaining how women’s work and earnings have changed across generations.

Economist

Joseph Stiglitz

Explaining how unequal information changes the way markets work.

Psychologist

Daniel Kahneman

Showing how judgement and economic choices depart from ideal rationality.

Economist

Adam Smith

Explaining markets, the division of labour and the sources of national wealth.

Economist

W. Arthur Lewis

Explaining how workers move from subsistence livelihoods into an expanding modern economy through the Lewis development model.

Economist

Daron Acemoglu

Investigating how political and economic institutions shape prosperity, and co-writing Why Nations Fail.

Economist

Elinor Ostrom

Showing how communities can successfully manage shared resources such as forests, fisheries and irrigation systems.

Economist

Mariana Mazzucato

Arguing that governments actively shape innovation and should share in the value created by public investment.

Economist

Raúl Prebisch

Shaping Latin American development economics and challenging the advantages of commodity-led trade.

Economist

Milton Friedman

Advancing monetarism and becoming an influential advocate of free-market economic policy.

Economist

Celso Furtado

The economist who explained Brazilian underdevelopment through its colonial economy and unequal growth.

Economist

Thomas Piketty

The economist whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought wealth inequality into mainstream debate.

Economist

Friedrich Hayek

Explaining the role of dispersed knowledge in markets and arguing against central planning.

Economist

Kaushik Basu

Connecting economic theory with development policy as a World Bank chief economist and adviser to India.

Economist

Ha-Joon Chang

Questioning free-market development orthodoxy in Kicking Away the Ladder and accessible economics books.

Economist

Gunnar Myrdal

Connecting economics with social institutions and racial inequality.

Economist

Reinhard Selten

Refining game theory and developing experimental economics.

Economist

Bengt Holmström

Explaining how contracts and incentives work under uncertainty.

Economist

Leonid Hurwicz

Founding mechanism design and the idea of incentive compatibility.

Economist

Ragnar Frisch

Helping establish econometrics and sharing the first economics Nobel memorial prize.

Economist

David Card

Using natural experiments to study wages, immigration and employment.

Economist

Finn E. Kydland

Explaining business cycles and the time-consistency problem in economic policy.

Economist

Jean Tirole

Analysing market power and the regulation of large firms.

Economist

Leonid Kantorovich

Developing linear programming for allocating scarce resources.

Economist

Maurice Allais

Winning the 1988 economics prize for work on markets and resource allocation.

Economist

Myron Scholes

Co-developing the Black–Scholes option-pricing model.

Economist

Robert Mundell

Developing the theory of optimum currency areas

Economist

Christopher A. Pissarides

Explaining unemployment through search-and-matching theory.

Economist

Philippe Aghion

Explaining economic growth through innovation and creative destruction.

Economist

James Mirrlees

Explaining incentives and taxation when information is unequal.

Economist

James Heckman

Developing methods to account for selection bias in economic data.

Economist

Tjalling Koopmans

Mathematical analysis of efficient resource allocation

Economist

William Nordhaus

Integrating climate change into economic models

Mathematician

Robert Aumann

Game-theoretic analysis of repeated interaction

Economist

Oliver Hart

Explaining ownership and incomplete contracts

Economist

Joshua Angrist

Developing methods for estimating causal effects in economics.

Economist

Richard Stone

Developing systems of national economic accounts.

Economist

William Vickrey

Auction theory and pricing crowded roads and public services.

Economist

Michael Spence

Explaining how education can signal ability in the job market.

Economist

James M. Buchanan

Public choice theory and the rules of collective decisions.

Economist

Guido Imbens

Methods for drawing causal conclusions from natural experiments.

Economist

Gérard Debreu

Mathematical foundations of general economic equilibrium.

Economist

Douglass North

Explaining economic history through institutions and incentives.

Economist

Trygve Haavelmo

Establishing probability-based foundations for econometrics.

Economist

Saburo Okita

Helping shape Japan’s postwar economic planning.

Economist

Simon Kuznets

Measuring national income and long-term economic growth.

Economist

James A. Robinson

Research linking political institutions and economic prosperity.