William F. Shughart II is F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics at The University of Mississippi. Previously the holder of the the Robert M. Hearin Chair and the P. M. B. Self, William King Self, and Henry C. Self Free Enterprise Chair 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 and was on the Southern Economic Association's Board of Trustees from 1996 to 1998, is 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.