William Jack Baumol (born February 26, 1922) is an American economist. He is a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. A prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles, Baumol has written extensively about labor market and other economic factors that affect the economy. He also made significant contributions to the theory of entrepreneurship and the history of economic thought. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. He was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2003, and Thompson Reuters in 2014 predicted falsely that he would win in 2014.