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Top Economics Influencers to Follow

Economics influencers such as academics, journalists, industry professionals and even central bankers frequently take to Twitter to share their daily thoughts on all things economics, finance, monetary policy and politics in concise yet informative 280-character Tweets. We have updated our popular list of the top 77 economics influencers that you can follow on Twitter. Nominees came from our team at FocusEconomics and we have ranked this list by the number of followers. This list can be thought of as a living document: We will refresh the list from time to time to keep it up-to-date and suggest more influencers for you to follow.

1. Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is an economist who needs no introduction. According to his website he has “at least three jobs.” He is a Distinguished Professor at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics and perhaps he is best known for his third job, op-ed columnist for the New York Times. The Economist referred to him as the “the most celebrated economist of his generation.” He also won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in 2008.

2. Nate Silver

Nate Silver is an interesting person to be included on this list. Although he is an economist, having graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in economics, and previously worked as an economics consultant, he is most well-known as a statistician and writer, analyzing baseball and elections for FiverThirtyEight, of which he also happens to be the founder. He also wrote the book The Signal and the Noise where he examines, among other things, why so many predictions fail and the power of the consensus. If you are interested in sports, stats, elections and predictions, follow Silver.

3. Steve H. Hanke

Steve Hanke is a Professor of Applied Economics at The Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Senior Fellow and Director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a contributor at National Review, a well-known currency reformer, and a commodity trader. He served on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, advised five foreign heads of state and five foreign cabinet ministers, and held a cabinet-level rank in Lithuania and Montenegro. He was President of Toronto Trust Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1995, when it was the world’s best-performing mutual fund.

4. Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is a Turkish economist who grew up in Italy before moving to the United States where he received a doctorate from Harvard University. He was an academic at Yale and a researcher/advisor and his early research focused on emerging markets. In the 1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration, for one year he was a senior economist in the Council of Economic Advisers, and the following three months he was a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner (who was then the Treasury Department undersecretary for international affairs). He currently teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business and is chairman of Roubini Macro Associates, an economic consultancy firm.

5. John Burn-Murdoch

John describes his work as “stories, stats & scatterplots for The Financial Times”. His official title at the FT is Chief Data Reporter. John is a data journalist who uses numbers to illustrate stories. He is a visiting lecturer at City University London and previously worked as a data journalist at The Guardian. His Twitter account is always updated with interesting links and data that he’s recently published.

6. Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. A recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and chairman of the (US president’s) Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University.


7. Gita Copinath

Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist who has served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), since 21 January 2022. She had previously served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022. Prior to joining the IMF, Gopinath had a two-decade-long career as an academic including at the economics department of Harvard University where she was the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Economics (2005-2022) and earlier an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2001-05).


8. Noah Smith

Noah Smith is an economist who was an opinion writer for Bloomberg but left to fully focus on blogs at noahpinion and is a former professor of finance at Stony Brook University. In mid-2020, he founded www.TestAndTrace.com, A Strategy to Contain COVID-19 Outbreaks.

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9. Mariana Mazzucato

Mariana is a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and Founder/Director of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Her work is focused on the relationship between innovation and the direction of growth, with emphasis on rethinking the public sector’s role to ensure growth is more innovation-led, inclusive and sustainable. She is winner of international prizes including the Grande Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2021, Italy’s highest civilian honor, the 2020 John von Neumann Award, the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Her 2018 book, The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, brings the debate about value back to the heart of economics, so to ensure we are rewarding value creation over value extraction and destruction.

10. Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a professor at EHESS in Paris and the Paris School of Economics. He is also a distinguished Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. His economics research is centered mainly on wealth and income inequality as well as the use of capital in the 21st century. In fact, he has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development and the distribution of income and wealth. He also writes for Le Monde and authored the international best-selling book Capital in the 21st century.

11. Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a professor at George Mason University and currently the L. Harris Chair of Economics and chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at GMU. Cowen frequently appears in the media as a writer and opinion contributor to media outlets such as the New York Times and Bloomberg.

12. Justin Wolfers

Justin Wolfers is an Australian economist. He is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers, among other appointments. He was recently named by the IMF as one of the “25 economists under 45 shaping the way we think about the global economy.” His research focuses on labor economics, macroeconomics, political economy, law and economics, social policy and behavioral economics.

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13. Barry Ritholtz

Barry Ritholtz is an American author, newspaper columnist, blogger, equities analyst and is the founder and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He is a frequent guest and commentator on economics and finance for major news outlets such as Bloomberg where he also hosts a podcast called Masters in Business. Economists by nature tend to be pessimistic and sometimes Ritholtz can take a pessimistic tone, however, that may have more to do with being an avid New York Knicks basketball fan than an economist.

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14. Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times. Having worked at Shell, The World Bank, and as an educator at Oxford University, Harford draws on his life experiences to bring a unique perspective to economics, business and politics and how they affect us in our everyday lives. Give his account a follow.

15. Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson is Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab at the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was formerly a professor at MIT Sloan School where he taught courses on Economics of Information and the Analytics Lab. He was also the Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and thus his research examines the effect of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and performance, digital commerce and intangible assets. In general, he tweets about economics. Don’t forget to give him a follow.

16. Catherine Rampell

Catherine Rampell is a data-driven journalist and an opinion columnist for the Washington Post. She is also a contributor to CNN, a special correspondent on PBS Newshour and a contributor to Marketplace. Catherine was formerly a journalist with the New York Times. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism.

17. Dani Rodrik

Dani Rodrik is a Turkish economist and professor at Harvard University whose research covers globalization, economic growth and development, and political economy. Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is currently President of the International Economic Association, and co-director of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity.


18. Christophe Barraud

Christophe Barraud is a PhD in economics and Chief Economist and Strategist at Market Securities, based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Bloomberg and has been named by Bloomberg the title of Top Forecaster of the U.S. Economy (from 2012 to 2020 and in 2022), Eurozone Economy (from 2015 to 2019 and in 2022) and Chinese Economy (from 2017 to 2020). He also won the Forecaster of the Year contest organized by MarketWatch in 2020.


19. Atif Mian

Atif Mian is a professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University. With a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and a PhD in Economics from MIT, his work largely studies the connection between finance and the macro economy. Mian is also the author of the critically acclaimed House of Debt, which describes how debt precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis and examines how debt continues to threaten the global economy and what should be done to correct the financial system. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021. He is the first person of Pakistani origin to rank among the top 25 young economists of the world.


20. Daniel Lacalle

Daniel Lacalle is Chief Economist and Investment Officer at Tressis, SV, a PhD in Economics and author of “Life In The Financial Markets” and “The Energy World Is Flat” as well as “Escape From the Central Bank Trap”. He has been ranked as one of the Top 20 Economists in the World by Richtopia and has over 24 years of experience in the energy and finance sectors.

21. Pedro da Costa

Pedro da Costa is EPI’s former communications director and host of EPI’s State of Working America podcast. Da Costa has been writing about economics and financial markets since 2001, at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider, and he was a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 2014 to 2016. His work has focused on issues close to EPI’s mission: labor markets, Federal Reserve policy, inequality, and race.


22. William Easterly

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute, which won the 2009 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award. He has written numerous books including the most recent The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014). He has written columns for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Review of Books and Washington Post. Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009, and Thomson Reuters listed him as one of Highly Cited Researchers of 2014.

23. Austan Goolsbee

Austan Dean Goolsbee is an American economist and writer. He is the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Goolsbee formerly served as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2010-2011 and a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet. He served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 2018-2019. His ability to explain economics in a clear and understandable way has earned him a lot of recognition in the media with Jon Stewart, the former host of the Daily Show, referring to him as “Eliot Ness meets Milton Friedman.”

24. Steve Keen

Steve Keen is an Australian economist and a professor of economics at the University of Kingston in London. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. In addition to following him on Twitter you can also catch his podcasts on Patreon, which have become quite popular of late.

25. Annie Lowrey

Annie Lowrey is an American journalist who writes on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic. Previously, Lowrey covered economic policy for the New York Times and prior to that was the Moneybox columnist for Slate. She was also a staff writer for the Washington Independent and served on the editorial staffs of Foreign Policy and The New Yorker. She is a leading proponent of universal basic income.

26. Frances Coppola

Frances Coppola previously worked in banks for 17 years and now she covers them along with finance and economics more generally for publications such as Forbes. Author of ‘The Case For People’s Quantitative Easing’ (Polity Books), she did an MBA at the Cass Business School in London where she specialized in financial risk management. Her blog, Coppola Comment is one of our Top Economics and Finance Blogs and is a regular feature on the FT’s Alphavilla blog.


27. David Wessel

David Wessel is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, the mission of which is to improve the quality of fiscal and monetary policies and public understanding of them. He joined Brookings in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. He is a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets often at @davidmwessel.


28. Brad Delong

Brad Delong is an economic historian and a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkley. Delong also worked in the U.S. government, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration working on the 1993 budget and NAFTA, among other initiatives. He is also one of the original members of the economic blogosphere, having blogged for over 20 years with his personal blog currently entitled Grasping Reality with Both Hands.


29. Russ Roberts

Russ Roberts is an economist and research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is perhaps most well-known as the host of EconTalk, a podcast in which he frequently interviews a guest on topics of economics. Roberts considers himself a classical liberal and believes in “limited government combined with personal responsibility.”

30. Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities having joined in May 2011. Prior to that he was the Chief Economics and Economics Adviser to Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden and a member of President Obama’s economics team. Bernstein’s areas of expertise are fiscal policy, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, and finance and housing market analysis. In February 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Bernstein to serve as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

31. Ben Casselman

Ben Casselman writes about economics and other business topics for The New York Times, with a particular focus on stories involving data. He previously served as chief economics writer for the data-journalism website FiveThirtyEight, and before that as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Casselman won a Loeb Award in 2011 for his coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and was part of a team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

32. Dean Baker

Dean Baker is an American economist and the co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is frequently cited in media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and CNBC, among others. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble. He also writes for the CEPR, in his blog, Beat the Press, which features his commentary on economic reporting. He received his PhD in economics from the Univeristy of Michigan.

33. Alex Tabarrok

Alex Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist. With Tyler Cowen, he co-authors the economics blog Marginal Revolution. Tabarrok and Cowen have also ventured into online education with Marginal Revolution University. Tabarrok is a professor at Virginia’s George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the school’s Mercatus Center. In addition, Tabarrok is director of research for the Oakland, California based think tank the Independent Institute.

34. Diane Coyle

Diane Coyle CBE FAcSS is an economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She was vice-chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and was a member of the UK Competition Commission from 2001 until 2019. Since March 2018, she has been the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, co-directing the Bennett Institute.

35. Adam Posen

Adam Posen is an American economist and President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He became President of the Peterson Institute on January 1, 2013, having first joined PIIE in July 1997. Over his career, Posen has been particularly vocal in his writings regarding the economic and financial challenges faced by the European Union since the adoption of the euro, Japan’s economic hardships since the 1990s as well as the fiscal and monetary policies of the G7 countries. In 2006 he was a Houblon-Norman Senior Fellow at the Bank of England, on sabbatical from Peterson Institute for International Economics.


36. Jennifer Doleac

Jennifer Doleac is an Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. She is also a Research Fellow at IZA, and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. She studies the economics of crime and discrimination. In October 2022, Vox named her to their “Future Perfect 50,” a list of “scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists building a more perfect future,” writing, “Doleac looks at criminal justice policy through the lens of causal factors on a society-wide level.”


37. Betsey Stevenson

Betsey Stevenson is an economist and Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. She was a member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers and also previously served as the Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor.

 

38. Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is an American economist and economic historian who holds the title of George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. Eichengreen currently serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He has been published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system and served as a senior policy adviser at the International Monetary Fund.

39. Sandy Darity

Sandy Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University. Author of “From Here to Equality”, his research topics include inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, in addition to other topics. He is also a former president of the National Economic Association (1986), the Southern Economic Association (1996), and the Association of Black Sociologists (2015-2017).


40. Edward Harrison

Edward Harrison is a banking and finance specialist at the economic consultancy Global Macro Advisors. Previously, he worked in various strategy and finance roles at Deutsche Bank, Bain Consulting, and Yahoo. Mr. Harrison started his career as a diplomat in the foreign service. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and completed his undergraduate studies with a degree in economics from Dartmouth College. He writes at the blog Credit Writedowns.

41. Darrick Hamilton

Darrick Hamilton is an American academic and administrator who is currently the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and a University Professor at The New School for Social Research. He is also the director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at The New School. Prior to assuming these roles in January 2021, Hamilton was executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University


42. Mark Thoma

Mark Thoma is a macroeconomist and econometrician and a professor of economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Oregon. Thoma is best known as a regular columnist for The Fiscal Times through his blog “Economist’s View”, which Paul Krugman called “the best place by far to keep up with the latest in economic discourse”, and as an analyst at CBS MoneyWatch. He is also a regular contributor to EconoMonitor.

43.David Smith

David Smith has been economics editor of The Sunday Times since 1989. He is also chief leader-writer, assistant editor and policy adviser. David is the author of several books, including Free Lunch: Easily Digestible Economics; and Something Will Turn Up: Britain’s Economy Past, Present and Future. He is a visiting professor at Cardiff and Nottingham Universities and has won a number of awards.

44. Constantin Gurdgiev

Constantin Gurdgiev is an economist and professor based in the US. He is a former editor of Business & Finance Magazine. Gurdgiev is well known in Ireland from his frequent appearances on the Tonight with Vincent Browne television show on TV3 during the great recession. Gurdgiev identifies as a left-libertarian. He left the post in March 2008, and joined NCB Stockbrokers, but continued at the magazine as an editorial advisor and contributor.


45. Leah Boustan

Leah Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she also serves as the Director of the Industrial Relations Section. Her research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her first book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the effect of the Great Black Migration from the rural south during and after World War II. Professor Boustan is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also serves as co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Professor Boustan was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2012 and won the IZA Young Labor Economists Award in 2019.

46. Jodi Beggs

Jodi Beggs is an economist and data scientist. She has been an economics instructor at Harvard since 2004, teaching courses within Harvard College, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard Extension School. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northeastern University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in macroeconomic theory and behavioral economics. She also founded the website EconomistsDoItWithModels.com. Her research is concentrated in behavioral economics and incentives as well as bit of data science. Beggs has a unique ability to make economics more appealing to a wider audience with her witty, humorous yet educational style of communication.

47. Rachel Glennerster

Rachel Glennerster is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. She is a British economist and currently the Chief Economist for the UK Department for International Development. Before joining J-PAL and the International Growth Centre, Glennerster worked as an economic adviser to HM Treasury, a Development Associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development, and as a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

48. David Andolfatto

David Andolfatto received his Ph.D. in economics in 1994 from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. In 2009, he was awarded the Bank of Canada Fellowship Award for his contributions in the theory of money, banking, and monetary policy. In that same year, David left Canada to become Vice President, and then Senior Vice President, in the research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he served as a senior policy advisor for James Bullard, CEO and president of the Bank. He left the Fed in 2022 to become Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Miami Patti and Allan Herbert Business School. If you want to get the almost daily perspective of a central banker, this is an account to follow.

49. Mike “Mish” Shedlock

Mike Shedlock a.k.a. Mish is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management and runs the blog Mish Talk, a daily blog on global economics. Mish focuses on “the global macro picture, both foreign and domestic […] jobs, currencies, gold, equities, interest rates, GDP, and the impacts of political decisions on the markets.”

50. Damon Jones

Damon Jones is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research is at the intersection of three fields within economics: public finance, household finance and behavioral economics. In November 2020, Jones was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Council of Economic Advisers.

51. Wolf Richter

Wolf Richter is the CEO of Wolf Street Corp. and the editor-in-chief at Wolf Street, where he muses about economic, business, and financial issues, Wall Street shenanigans, European entanglements, and other things, debacles, and opportunities in the US, Europe, Japan, and occasionally China. Wolf lives and labors in San Francisco. He has over twenty years of C-level operations experience, including turnarounds and a VC-funded startup.

52. David Boaz

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank. He is described as a provocative commentator and leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government and libertarianism. He is frequently published in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Lost Angeles Times, National Review, among others as well as making frequent appearances on television and radio. He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997 by the Free Press and described in the Los Angeles Times as “a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.”

53. Miles Kimball

Miles Kimball is an economist who is currently the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Kimball refers to himself as the “supply-side liberal” and he “holds many strong opinions—open to revision in response to cogent arguments—that do not line up neatly with either the Republican or Democratic Party.” On his blog, “Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal,” he has been an advocate for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates in order to make deep negative interest rates a viable monetary policy option. His account is one to follow.

54. Heidi Shierholz

Heidi Shierholz is the former Chief Economist to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, serving under Secretary Thomas Perez. Shierholz is president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. that advocates for liberal views. Shierholz was previously a labor market economist with EPI. At EPI, Shierholz worked on unemployment policy, ways to support the long-term unemployed, and possible policies to pull America out of the recession.

55. Lars Christensen

Lars Christensen is an internationally renowned Danish economist specialising in the international economy, Emerging Markets and monetary policy. Lars has over 20 years’ experience in government and banking and is the founder and owner of Markets and Money Advisory and is a Senior Fellow at London’s Adam Smith Institute. In 2006-8 Lars co-authored a number of reports warning of a coming economic meltdown in Central and Eastern Europe and maybe most famously Lars co-authored the report “Geyser Crisis” in 2006, which correctly forecasted a major economic and financial crisis in Iceland. Lars also blogs at The Market Monetarist. His blog The Market Monetarist has since it was started in 2011 become one of the leading international blogs on monetary policy.

56. Shelly Lundberg

Shelly Lundberg is one of the world’s foremost population econmists and serves as the Leonard Broom Professor of Demography and a Professor of Economics at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on labor economics, inequality and the economics of the family. In her research, she has particularly frequently collaborated with Robert A. Pollak. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Lundberg belongs to the top 2% of economists in terms of her research.

57. William Spriggs

William Spriggs is an American economist who worked as chair of the Howard University Department of Economics from 2005 to 2009 and assistant secretary of labor for policy from 2009 to 2012. He is also a professor of economics at Howard University and chief economist for the AFL-CIO. Spriggs’ work and research focuses on workforce discrimination, minimum wage, national and international labor standards, and pay equity.

58. Chris Dillow

Chris Dillow is an economics writer at the Investors Chronicle. He is the author of New Labour and the end of Politics and blogs at Stumbling and Mumbling. In a previous life, he used to work as an economist for one of Japan’s largest banks and has worked in the City for almost 10 years. Chris is an independent contributor to THINK. He blogs at Stumbling and Mumbling.


59. Roger Farmer

Roger Farmer is a British/American economist. He is currently a professor at the University of Warwick and is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Economics department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His body of work has advanced the view that beliefs are a new fundamental in economics that have the same methodological status as preferences, technology, and endowments. In his 1993 book, Macroeconomics of Self-fulfilling Prophecies, he argues that beliefs should be modeled with the introduction of a Belief Function, which explains how people form ideas about the future based on things they have seen in the past.

60. Owen Zidar

Owen Zidar is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He previously worked as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, as well as an analyst at Bain Capital Ventures. Zidar is a public finance economist who studies the taxation of firms and top earners, local fiscal policy, and the creation and distribution of economic profits.

61. Evan Soltas

Evan Soltas is a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with his current research in the fields of public economics and political economy. Soltas has been writing on economics for some time with his previous work having been cited in Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the New York Times and Vox.

62. Cameron Crise

Cameron Crise is a macro strategist at Bloomberg, where he writes the Macro Man column and posts on the Markets Live blog. Previously, he was a global macro portfolio manager at Graham Capital in Connecticut and Nylon Capital in London. Earlier in his career, he was a currency portfolio manager and economist for several European asset management firms and held a variety of foreign exchange roles at UBS. He is a graduate of Duke University with a degree in public policy studies and history.

63. Catherine Mann

Catherine Mann joined the faculty of International Business School at Brandeis in 2006 after more than 20 years working in policy institutions and think tanks in Washington DC, including the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the President’s Council of Economic Advisers at the White House, and the World Bank. Her current research focuses on two related topics: international trade, capital flows, and the dollar; and globalization of Information technology and economic performance. Professor Mann is currently serving as the Chief Economist at the OECD.

64. Timothy Taylor

Timothy Taylor is an American economist. He is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a quarterly academic journal produced at Macalester College and published by the American Economic Association. Taylor received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Haverford College and a master’s degree in economics from Stanford University. At Minnesota, he was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Department of Economics and voted Teacher of the Year by the master’s degree students at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

65. Lawrence Mishel

Lawrence Mishel is distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a pro-labor think-tank that seeks to advance the interests of American workers. He has been at EPI since 1987, first serving as Research Director, then as Vice-president and then as president from 2002 to 2017. Mishel’s primary research interests are centered on labor markets and education, having written extensively on wage and job quality trends in the U.S.

66. Francesco Saraceno

Francesco Saraceno is Deputy Department Director at OFCE-Sciences Po. He holds Ph.Ds in Economics from Columbia University and La Sapienza University of Rome. His main research interests include the relationship between inequality and macroeconomic performance, European macroeconomic policies, and the interaction between structural reforms, fiscal and monetary policies. He published in several international journals.


67. Antonio Fatas

Antonio Fatás is a Professor of Economics at INSEAD. He received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. He is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in London and has worked as an external consultant for international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the OECD and the World Bank. So, it’s safe to say, he’s qualified. Fatas shares his views on economic and financial market trends through his social media accounts and blog.

68. Jeff Miller

Jeff Miller was a partner in NewArc Investments from 1997-2019. After the purchase of NewArc by Incline Investment Advisors, Jeff became the Portfolio Manager for the combined firm. A registered investment advisor, Jeff worked for market makers at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, where he found anomalies in the standard option pricing models and developed new forecasting techniques. Jeff was a Public Policy analyst and formerly taught advanced research methods at the University of Wisconsin. He analyzed many issues related to state tax policy and provided quantitative modeling which helped inform state and local officials in Wisconsin for more than a decade. Miller may be most well-known currently for his blog, Dash of Insight, which he started over 10 years ago, which also happens to be one of our Top Economics and Finance Blogs.


69. Tim Worstall

Tim Worstall is a writer and Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London. He also happens to be one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare-earth metals – something he describes as, “an odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am.” Worstall has written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation.

70. Ed Dolan

Ed Dolan holds a PhD in economics from Yale University. He has taught in the United States at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, George Mason University and Gettysburg College. From 1990 to 2001, Dolan taught in Moscow, Russia, where he and his wife founded the American Institute of Business and Economics (AIBEc), an independent, not-for-profit MBA program. After 2001, he taught economics in several European countries, including Central European University in Budapest, the University of Economics in Prague, and 15 years of annual courses at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.

71. Mike Norman

Mike Norman is an economist and trader whose career spans over 30 years on Wall Street. He began his career at Merrill Lynch in 1979 then went on to become a member and floor trader on four U.S. futures exchanges (NYFE, NYMEX, COMEX, CME) Mr. Norman is a sought after TV commentator and has been seen regularly on CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox News. In 2003 he signed with Fox News as an exclusive Contributor and continues to appear on a regular basis on the Fox Business programs.

72. Chad Hagan

Chad Hagan is an economic adviser, family office executive and author. Known for applied research, middle-market investments and corporate restructuring – investments led by Chad have been covered by global business news including the LA Times, Bloomberg, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. He is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Hagan Capital Group. His economic and geopolitical blog Chaganomics can be found at www.chaganomics.com. Give him a follow.


73. Marie Mora

Marie Mora, Ph.D., is currently Provost Ad Interim and Professor of Economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver, after having served as the institution’s Deputy Provost. A labor economist, Dr. Mora has been invited to share her research expertise on the socioeconomic outcomes of U.S. Hispanics/Latinos with institutions and agencies across the U.S., including the White House, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and others.

74. James Picerno

James Picerno is the author of Dynamic Asset Allocation: Modern Portfolio Theory Updated for the Smart Investor (Bloomberg Press, 2010) and Nowcasting The Business Cycle: A Practical Guide For Spotting Business Cycle Peaks (Beta Publishing, 2014). His articles on finance and economics have appeared in a variety of publications and news outlets over the years, including The Atlantic, Financial Advisor, BankRate.com, HorsesMouth.com, and Bloomberg Briefs: Economics, and the Saxo Group’s TradingFloor.com. In addition, Picerno publishes The US Business Cycle Risk Report, a weekly newsletter that quantitatively evaluates US recession risk in real time.

75. David Giles

David Giles was Professor of Econometrics at University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, a position from which he has recently retired. David is ranked in the top 5% of authors by REPEC on almost all their metrics, and there are currently approximately 3,000 citations to his publications. His most cited works cover a range of his research interests covering econometric theory, applied econometrics, and statistics.


76. Lars P Syll

Lars P. Syll has a PhD in Economics and is currently a professor of civics at Malmö University in Sweden. Syll describes himself as a “critical realist” who opposes “all kinds of social constructivism and postmodern relativism”. As a social scientist and an economist in the mold of John Maynard Keynes, Syll frequently discusses topics such as education, theory of science and methodology, politics and society, as well as economics and econometrics.

77. Heidi Hartmann

An expert on the intersection between, economics, public policy and women’s role in each, Dr. Heidi Hartmann is the President and Founder of the Institue for Women’s Policy Research, a scientific research organization that seeks to meet the need for women-centered, poilicy-oriented research.  Hartmann has won various awards. In 1994, she won the MacArthur Fellowship Award—a five-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation give to individuals who show exceptional creativity for their research and the prospect for more in the future—for her work on women and economics.

That’s the end of the list of 77 top economics influencers to follow. If you have any feedback on the list or have any economics influencers that you think we should consider adding to the list, please contact us at media@focus-economics.com.

Latest update: April 2023


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