William F. Shughart II is F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics at The University of Mississippi. Previously the holder of two other named chairs at Ole Miss, Dr. Shughart received his Ph.D. in economics from Texas A&M University in 1978. He has taught at Clemson University and at George Mason University, where he was also a senior research associate at the Center for Study of Public Choice. Dr. Shughart, who served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics during the Reagan administration, is president-elect of the Southern Economic Association, senior editor of Public Choice, an associate editor of the Southern Economic Journal, and book review editor for Managerial and Decision Economics. He is a senior fellow and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Independent Institute, a member of the Heartland Institute's Board of Policy Advisors, a member of the Advisory Board and major contributor to The Encyclopedia of Public Choice (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), a principal consultant of Nathan Associates, a scholar of the Round Table Group, and the founding president of Oxford Economics, Inc.

Dr. Shughart has published more than 195 scholarly articles, book chapters, and reviews. His numerous books include The Organization of Industry (Irwin, 1990; Dame Publications, 1997); Antitrust Policy and Interest-Group Politics (Quorum Books 1990); Modern Managerial Economics: Economic Theory for Business Decisions (South-Western Publishing Co., 1994), co-authored with William F. Chappell and Rex L. Cottle; and The Political Economy of the New Deal (Edward Elgar, 1998), co-authored with Jim F. Couch. He is the co-editor (with Fred S. McChesney) of The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust: The Public-Choice Perspective (University of Chicago Press, 1995), the editor of the 1998 Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award-winning Independent Institute book, Taxing Choice: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination (Transaction Publishers, 1997), the senior editor (with Laura Razzolini) of The Elgar Companion to Public Choice (Edward Elgar, 2001), the co-editor (with Charles K. Rowley and Robert D. Tollison) of the two-volume Economics of Budget Deficits (Edward Elgar, 2002), and the co-editor (with Robert D. Tollison) of Policy Challenges and Political Responses: Public Choice Perspectives on the Post-9/11 World (Springer, 2005). In addition to his research interests in industrial organization, antitrust, and public choice, Dr. Shughart has written extensively on tax policy, energy policy, education reform, and college sports. His commentaries on these and other controversial issues have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times, the Detroit Free Press, the Commercial Appeal, the Birmingham (Ala.) News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Providence Journal-Bulletin, the Clarion-Ledger, the Journal of Commerce, Regulation, Insight on the News, Economic Affairs, and many other publications.