José Alexandre Scheinkman (born January 11, 1948) is a Brazilian-American economist, currently the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of Economics at Columbia University and the Theodore A.

Prior to immigrating to the United States to study for his PhD in Economics at the University of Rochester, he grew up and was educated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Scheinkman also participated actively in the interface between economics and physics organized by the Santa Fe Institute and often traveled to visiting positions in France, a country for which he has had a lifetime affection.

[4] Building on his interest in the intersection between economics and physics, he helped draw out and test some of the most salient implication of the theory of social interactions, in a series of papers with his star student Edward Glaeser (among others), for "Growth in Cities" (1992), crime (1996) and "Measuring Trust" (2000).

Perhaps one of the best loved of Scheinkman's papers is his work with Kevin Murphy and Sherwin Rosen on "Cattle Cycles" (1994), which provides one of the sharpest applications of natural economic theory to explain cyclical variations.

[citation needed] He was thesis adviser to prominent economists including Paul Romer, Albert (Pete) Kyle, Edward Glaeser, Alberto Bisin, Adriano Rampini, Giorgio Topa, and Glen Weyl.