LibGuides: Economics in Credo: 20th Century Economists

20th Century Economists (A - K)

Maurice Allais (1911-2010): Topic
French economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1988 for his contributions to the concept of efficiency in the use of resources via the price system.
Kenneth Arrow (1921-2017): Topic
US economist. With French-born US economist Gerard Debreu he developed the first rigorous proof of the existence of general equilibrium in a capitalist economy.
Emily Balch (1867-1961): Topic
American economist and sociologist. A founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1919), she shared the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize.
Gary Becker (1930-2014): Topic
US economist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992 for his work on a comprehensive economic theory of all aspects of human behavior.
William Beveridge (1879-1963): Topic
Economist and social reformer, born in Rangpur, W India. He studied at Oxford, and became a leading authority on unemployment insurance.
James Buchanan (1919-2013): Topic
US economist and the founder of ‘public choice theory’, the economic study of non-market decision-making or, alternatively expressed, the attempt to complete the theory of market exchange with a corresponding theory of the functioning of political markets.
Ronald Coase (1910-2013): Topic
English-born US economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991 for essentially two articles - ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1937) and ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (1960) - both of which spawned new sub-disciplines in economics: the economics of property rights and the economics of law.
Gerard Debreu (1921-2004): Topic
French-born US economist. He developed mathematical economic models with US economist Kenneth Arrow, and in 1954 they published an epoch-making paper in which they provided a definitive mathematical proof of the existence of general equilibrium.
Irving Fisher (1867-1947): Topic
US economist, noted for developing the quantity theory of money. His contributions ran all the way from mathematical statistics to monetary doctrine and the theory of value and prices to the theory of capital and interest.
Robert Fogel (1926-2013): Topic
US economic historian who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Douglass North for creating ‘cliometrics’, or the New Quantitative Economic History.
Ragnar Frisch (1895-1973): Topic
Norwegian economist. He shared the first Nobel Prize for Economics in 1969 with Jan Tinbergen, a Dutch economist, for pioneering efforts in econometrics (a label coined by Frisch), which is the application of statistics to economic theories expressed mathematically.
Milton Friedman (1912-2006): Topic
US economist, best known for his advocacy of monetarism - the control of aggregate demand solely by control of the money supply - and his unflinching support of the market in virtually all areas of economic life.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006): Topic
Born 1908 in Canada, US economist and diplomat; his economic works, generally Keynesian in philosophy, include The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967).
Alan Greenspan (1926- ): Topic
US economist, who succeeded US banker Paul Volcker as chair of the US Federal Reserve System in 1987.
John Harsanyi (1920-2000): Topic
Hungarian-born US economist. Harsanyi and Indian economist Amartya Sen are probably the leading figures in a small movement among economists to abandon the old taboo against making interpersonal comparisons of utility.
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992): Topic
Austrian economist and author of Road to Serfdom (1944), an indictment of government intervention in modern economies representing ‘creeping socialism’.
James Heckman (1944- ): Topic
US economist. Heckman developed methods for evaluating economic and social programmes involving taxes, subsidies, and affirmative action policies, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000 with US economist Daniel McFadden.
John Richard Hicks (1904-1989): Topic
English economist. Hicks is celebrated for his invention of the IS-LM diagram, which expounds the true meaning of English economist John Maynard Keynes's General Theory.
Tjalling Koopmans (1910-1985): Topic
Dutch-born US economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1975 for his work on ‘linear programming’ or ‘activity analysis’, sharing the prize with Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician-economist who had independently discovered the same method several years before the outbreak of World War II.
Daniel Kahneman (1934- ): Topic
Economist, born in Tel Aviv, Israel. He studied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1954 BA) and the University of California.
Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986): Topic
Soviet mathematical economist who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1975 with Dutch-born US economist Tjalling Koopmans for the independent development of linear programming.
Lawrence Klein (1920-2013): Topic
US economist. Klein was a leading figure in the golden period of econometric model-building, especially the big econometric model with hundreds of equations describing the workings of different sectors of economic activity and the flows of both private and public expenditure.
Simon Kuznets (1901-1985): Topic
Russian-born US economist. Kuznets was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1971 for his pre-war efforts in reconstructing the national income and product accounts of the USA back to 1919, and eventually back to 1869.

20th Century Economists (L - Z)

Wassily Leontief (1906-1999): Topic
Russian-born US economist whose entire life has been devoted to the development and refinement of a single technical tool, input-output analysis, which he conceived in his early youth and which he carried from Russia to the USA and from the USA to almost every country in the world.
William Arthur Lewis (1915-1991): Topic
British economist. His Theory of Economic Growth (1955) was one of the first textbooks in the post-war era to explore the problems of the developing world.
Robert Lucas (1937- ): Topic
US economist. Lucas did not invent the theory of rational expectations but he has been its most vigorous advocate.
Harry Markowitz (1927- ): Topic
US economist. He shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1990 with US economists Merton Miller and William Sharpe for pioneering the theory of rational behavior in relation to portfolio selection as distinguished from security selection.
Eric Stark Maskin (1950- ): Topic
US mathematician and economist. He won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2007 for his work on the foundations of mechanism design theory, which he shared with fellow Americans Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson.
James Edward Meade (1907-1995): Topic
English Keynesian economist who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1977 with Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin for his work on international trade.
Robert C. Merton (1944- ): Topic
US economist, known for his role in developing the Black and Scholes model, a valuation formula for pricing stock options.
James Mirrlees (1936-1996): Topic
Scottish economist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1996, with Canadian-born US economist William Vickrey, for fundamental contributions to the theory of optimal taxation in conditions of asymmetric information.
Franco Modigliani (1918-2003): Topic
Italian-born US economist, noted for his ‘lifecycle hypothesis’ and Modigliani-Miller theorem, established with US economist Merton Miller.
Robert Mundell (1932- ): Topic
Canadian economist who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1999 for his analysis of the optimum currency area and his work on the scope of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes.
Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987): Topic
Swedish economist. He shared a 1974 Nobel Prize for work on the theory of optimum allocation of resources.
Douglass North (1920-2015): Topic
US economic historian. He has been consistently in the forefront of the ‘new wave’ that swept through economic history in the 1960s and which has involved the attempt to apply the standard tools of neo-classical economics and econometrics to outstanding problems of economic history.
Bertil Ohlin (1899-1979): Topic
Swedish economist and political leader. He shared the 1977 Nobel Prize for Economics with the English economist James Meade for contributions to the theory of international trade.
Edward Prescott (1940- ): Topic
US economist. He received the 2004 Nobel Prize for Economics for his research on business cycles and time consistency in macroeconomic policy.
Paul Samuelson (1915-2009): Topic
US economist. His major works include Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) and Economics (1948). In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for contributions to every branch of economics.
Theodore Schultz (1902-1998): Topic
US agricultural economist. In addition to producing his own work in agriculture, Schultz was an effective popularizer and disseminator of the ideas of others, particularly the theory of human capital and the economics of the family.
Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950): Topic
Austrian-born US economist, sociologist, and historian of economic thought. Schumpeter was one of the giants of 20th-century economics, whose majestic vision of the entire economic process can rank with that of Scottish economist Adam Smith or German philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
William Sharpe (1934- ): Topic
US economist. Sharpe shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1990 with US economists Harry Markowitz and Merton Miller for extending Markowitz's earlier normative work on optimal financial decision-making under uncertainty.
Reinhard Selten (1930-2016): Topic
German economist who has made significant contributions to dynamic game theory.
Amartya Sen (1933- ): Topic
Indian economist. Having been successively (from 1963) professor of economics at Delhi University 1963-71, the London School of Economics 1971-77, and Oxford and Harvard universities, he became master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1998 before returning to Harvard in 2004
Robert Solow (1924- ): Topic
US economist, known primarily for his ground-breaking work on growth theory in the 1950s and 1960s. Solow also contributed to macroeconomic analysis and the economics of non-renewable resources.
George Stigler (1911-1991): Topic
US economist. His analysis of wage rate differences in labour markets is the starting-point of all later work on ‘search models’ of unemployment, according to which unemployment is interpreted as a voluntary spell of searching for the best job at the best rate of pay.
John Stone (1913-1991): Topic
English economist and statistician, awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1984, jointly with English economist James Meade, for pioneering estimates of British national income and expenditure, having been knighted six years earlier for the same achievement.
Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994): Topic
Dutch economist. He shared a 1969 Nobel Prize for the application of mathematics and statistical methods to economics.
James Tobin (1918-2002): Topic
US economist. Tobin was the USA's most distinguished Keynesian economist, meaning not only that he refused to embrace monetarism, but also that he consistently held the view that the original Keynesian theory of income determination was capable of being extended and refined to deal with the macroeconomic problems of the 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1981 for contributions to macroeconomics.
William Vickrey (1914-1996): Topic
Canadian-born US economist. A Quaker and conscientious objector during World War II, Vickrey spent his alternative service designing a new inheritance tax for Puerto Rico, which he later submitted as a PhD dissertation to Columbia University as an Agenda for Progressive Taxation (1949).