Paul Samuelson named Moore (along with Harry Gunnison Brown, Allyn Abbott Young, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Schultz) as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.
Moore was an early U.S. Ph.D. His academic career proceeded through an instructorship and lectureship at Johns Hopkins, a professorship at Smith College from 1897 to 1902 and finally to positions at Columbia University.
There is a strong family resemblance between this cycle work and the earlier sunspot research of William Stanley Jevons.
Moore's last book Synthetic Economics aimed to provide a statistical counterpart to Walras's general equilibrium theory.
With his contemporaries, Wesley Mitchell and Irving Fisher, H. L. Moore pioneered new kinds of quantitative economics in the United States.