Originally from Galveston, Texas, Ekelund attended St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, earning his B.B.A. in economics in 1962 and his M.A. in economics and history the next year. He first worked as an instructor in economics while completing his master's degree.
He then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to teach and continue his graduate work at Louisiana State University. He finished his Ph.D. 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.
Textbooks by Ekelund have sold successfully, with his and Robert Tollison's Economics now in a seventh edition. He also earned a place in the Who's Who in Economics and has been actively involved with the Southern Economic Association since serving as its vice-president in 1984.
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.[4]
Dupuit and the French engineers
Ekelund's 1999 book with Robert Hébert on Jules Dupuit and his contemporaries.
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."[5] According to a July 1999 book review in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology,
The book succeeds in staking out a claim for Dupuit as one of the founders of formal economic theory and reasoning. This is a stellar performance and a book that will shake up the historiography of the discipline for decades to come. At future professional meetings we shall debate the origins of modern neoclassical economics: British or French?[6]
Economics of religion
Sacred Trust and The Marketplace of Christianity have both spawned debate among those interested in the economics of religion. Auburn economist John Wells argues in his March 1998 Journal of Markets and Morality review of Sacred Trust that,
The upshot from each of the chapters is that the Church consistently sought after profits and responded to economic incentives in a manner consonant with modern economic analysis. Taken as a whole, they propose numerous challenges to those who maintain a public-interest approach to Church history. Sacred Trust allows us to understand the seemingly irrational policies adopted by the Church during the Middle Ages. The persecutions of William Tyndale, the friends of John Wycliffe, and other Bible translators, though not addressed in this book, take on new meaning in the context of Sacred Trust.[7]
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."[8]
Fine arts
In addition to his work in economics, Ekelund is an artist[9][10][11] and an avid art collector and curator whose collection has been exhibited in several museums.[12] 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.[13]
He is also a classically-trained pianist and in the Summer of 2005 recorded an album, For The Piano, for which he played the Mises Institute's Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano.
Books
As author:
A History of Economic Theory and Method with Robert F. Hébert. (available in Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese, and Portuguese editions) McGraw-Hill, 1975. (ISBN 0-0701-9143-3; 5th edition, Waveland Press. 2007, ISBN 57766-486-8)
Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective with Robert Tollison. Texas A&M University Press, 1981.
The Essentials of Money and Banking with Leonardo Auernheimer. John Wiley & Sons, 1982.
Macroeconomics with Charles DeLorme. Business Publications, 1983.
Economics: Private Markets and Public Choice with Robert Tollison. Little, Brown, and Company, 1986. (7th Edition. Addison-Wesley-Longman, 2006. ISBN 0-321-33630-5)
Advertising and the Market Process: A Modern Economic View with David Saurman. Pacific Institute, 1988.
A History of Economic Theory and Method, with Robert F. Hébert, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990
Intermediate Macroeconomics with Charles D. DeLorme and Dennis Jansen. West Educational Publishing, 1994.
Intermediate Microeconomics: Price Theory and Applications with Richard Ault. D. C. Heath, 1995.
Classics in Economic Thought with Robert F. Hébert. McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism with Robert Tollison. Texas A&M University Press, 1997. (ISBN 0-8909-6745-8)
Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers with Robert F. Hébert. University of Chicago Press, March 1999. (ISBN 0-2261-9999-1)
Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm with Robert F. Hébert, Robert Tollison, Gary Anderson, and Audrey Davidson. Oxford University Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-1951-0337-8)
Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War with Mark Thornton. Scholarly Resource Books, 2004. (ISBN 0-8420-2961-3)
The Persistence of Myth and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Mexican Art with Catherine Walsh. Taylor Museum of Art, 2004.
The Marketplace of Christianity with Robert F. Hébert and Robert D. Tollison. (available in Italian) MIT Press, November 2006. (ISBN 0-2620-5082-X)
As editor:
The Evolution of Modern Demand Theory: A Collection of Essays with Eirik G. Furubotn and W. P. Gramm. D. C. Heath and Co., 1972
The Foundations of Regulatory Economics in 3 volumes. Edward Elgar, 1988.
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