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Charles W. Baird

Former Professor of Economics, California State University, East Bay

Dr. Baird, a Policy Advisor to The Heartland Institute, often asserts that he has the best of both worlds: a Berkeley degree and a UCLA education.

He was Professor of Economics at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) from 1973 to his retirement in July 2007. He was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Business and Economics from 2005 – 2007. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala.

Dr. Baird is a member, and a past Vice President and member of the Board of Directors, of the Mont Pelerin Society — the international free-market organization founded by F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman (and others) in 1947. He was Director of the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at CSUEB from its founding in 1991 to his retirement in 2007. The principal mission of the Smith Center is to foster a better understanding of free market principles and their application to public policy.

Dr. Baird is a quarterly columnist in The Freeman, a magazine devoted to free market principles and published by the Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY. He is also on the editorial boards of three academic journals, an adjunct scholar with the CATO Institute in Washington, DC, a member of the Advisory Board of the Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a consultant on labor economics to the New Zealand Business Roundtable.

Dr. Baird has published four textbooks (all of which went into second edition), nine public policy monographs, and over 90 articles in several journals and magazines. His research specialty is in law and economics of labor relations. He has also written on environmentalism, the economics of politics, the tax system, and the Austrian school of economics.