Robert Ekelund

His interests in the economics of regulation were combined with Sir Edwin Chadwick's historical study in 2012. Chadwick's sophisticated 19th-century conceptions of moral hazard, common pool problems, asymmetric information, and theory of "competition for the field" of service (franchising) were pioneering concepts in contemporary theory but were only rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century. Ekelund along with E. O. Price chronicled these stark innovations in a recent book entitled The Economics of Edwin Chadwick: Incentives Matter. According to Professor Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago, "Economists owe a great debt to Ekelund and Price for making us aware of Edwin Chadwick's seminal contributions. Chadwick lived in the middle of the 19th century, but he anticipated many of the theoretical and practical advances that culminated in the law and economics revolution of the late 20th century. These include Coase's analysis of social cost and Demsetz's proposal for franchise bidding in natural monopolies. Read the summary of Chadwick's ideas about railroads and consider that Britain adopted many of them but only more than a century later. The book is full of similar examples where Chadwick's prescience is extraordinary. Economists, legal scholars and practitioners, especially those working at the intersection of law and economics, will want to read this book."

In his Chronicle of Higher Education review of The Marketplace of Christianity, David Glenn notes that arguments in the book that Westerners have demanded "cheaper" religions over time are at odds with assertions by economist Laurence R. Iannaccone that "strict churches are strong." Barry R. Chiswick in his 2009 review of the book in the Journal of Economic Literature, notes that Ekelund and his cohorts use income, education, the state of science and full price of alternative religious beliefs to predict the types of religions chosen. Factors affecting demand and risk profiles between mainline Protestant religions, on the one hand, and fundamentalist and traditionalist Roman Catholics, on the other relate

He is also a classically trained pianist and has recorded five albums: Solace (also called For the Piano); Reverie; Bach, Beethoven, Brahms; Musical Idioms; and Reflections on Childhood, performing works by Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Grieg, Griffes, Scott Joplin, Turina, Granados, Gershwin, and others. He has been a contestant in the 2008, 2009, 2012, and 2014 Van Cliburn Amateur Competition, and he created an homage to Chopin's 200th birthday. Many piano works, including his Van Cliburn entries, appear on his YouTube channel.

In addition to his work in economics, Ekelund is an artist who has shown regularly in juried and other shows over the past two decades with solo and joint exhibitions in Alabama. Ekelund has also designed book covers for the University of Chicago Press and Edward Elgar Publishing in London. He is an avid art collector and curator whose collection has been exhibited in several museums. He was a founding member of the advisory board for the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, Alabama and was the museum's acting co-director from 2006 to 2007 and chairman of the Advisory Board from 2010 to 2012.

His 1999 collaboration with Hébert, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics, has been praised for publicizing the theoretical and applied achievements of Jules Dupuit and others whose work in economics was often previously overlooked as mere engineering literature. In his review, economist Marcel Boumans of the University of Amsterdam asserts, "For too long they were neglected in the history of economics. Ekelund and Hebert's tribute to their work remedies this shortcoming." According to a July 1999 book review in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology,

Sacred Trust and The Marketplace of Christianity have both spawned debate among those interested in one of the latest new "fields" in economics—the economics of religion. Economist John Wells argues in his March 1998 Journal of Markets and Morality review of Sacred Trust that,

The interface between culture and economics, including the study of specific markets and institutions relating to art and museums, caught the interest of economists, including Ekelund, decades ago. Economist David Throsby established "cultural economics" in the hierarchy of the American Economic Association's index of topics considered "economics" in 1994. Ekelund has been associated with such studies for several decades, conducting studies with colleagues in the late 20th and early 21st centuries using a small auction sample of Latin American art. Later, with colleagues and an acute interest in American art, he analyzed a database of 14,000 observations on 80 American artists born in the 19th and 20th centuries. A series of contributions was followed by a book, The Economics of American Art: Issues, Artists and Market Institutions, published in 2017. The book studies a number of critical issues including (a) how the market for American art developed historically from colonial times to the present; (b) how the age of an American artist is related to her productivity; (c) how returns to art investment in the pre-1950 and contemporary periods compare to other types of investments; (d) the economic underpinnings of art crime, such as theft and the creation of fakes; and (e) how the "bubble" observed in art markets is facilitated by the institutions through which art is marketed.

Ekelund's 1981 book with Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society, is cited as an exemplar of the school of thought that argues that mercantilism, rather than being the result of miscalculation, was a system designed by rent-seekers to enforce public policy favorable towards themselves.

He then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to teach and continue his graduate work at Louisiana State University. He finished his PhD in economics and political theory there in 1967. His doctoral dissertation was on Jules Dupuit, a French civil engineer and economist. Ekelund would maintain this interest in Dupuit, making him the topic of a dozen journal articles and a 1999 book, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers.

In 1967, after the completion of his PhD, Ekelund was hired by Texas A&M University economics department. He was made Professor of Economics in 1974 and remained on the faculty of the College Station, Texas school until 1979, when he moved to Auburn, Alabama to become a professor at Auburn University. Ekelund was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and in 2003 he served as the Vernon Taylor Distinguished Visiting Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Ekelund is now Catherine and Edward Lowder Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Auburn University and is a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. He is also an Independent Institute research fellow and an adjunct faculty member of the Mises Institute.

Originally from Galveston, Texas, Ekelund attended St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, earning his BBA in economics in 1962 and his MA in economics and history the next year. He was a member of the Order of the Barons and first worked as an instructor in economics while completing his master's degree.

Robert Burton Ekelund Jr. (born 1940) is an American economist.