Rate My Professor Ross Emmett

Ross B. Emmett is Director of the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty and Professor of Economic Thought in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, positions held since 2018. He also serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Economics. Previously, Emmett was Professor of Political Economy and Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy at James Madison College, Michigan State University from 2009 to 2018, and Associate Professor there from 2003 to 2009. Earlier appointments include John P. Tandberg Chair & Associate Professor of Economics at Augustana University College (1997-2003), Associate Professor (1994-1997) and Assistant Professor (1989-1994) at the same institution, and Assistant Professor of Business (1982-1984) and Instructor of Business (1981-1982) at Trinity Western University. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Manitoba in 1989, with the dissertation “The Economist as Philosopher”: Frank H. Knight and American Social Science during the Twenties and Early Thirties, which received the Joseph Dorfman Best Dissertation Award from the History of Economics Society in 1992. Additional degrees include an I.M.B.A. in Business with concentration in International Finance & Banking from the University of South Carolina (1981) and a B.A. in History cum laude from Old Dominion University (1978).

Emmett specializes in the history of economic thought, with emphasis on the Chicago School of Economics and Frank H. Knight. He has edited major works including Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight (University of Chicago Press, 1999), The Chicago Tradition in Economics, 1892-1945 (Routledge, 2001), Great Bubbles: Reactions to the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi Scheme and the Tulip Mania Affair (Pickering & Chatto, 2000), Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics (Routledge, 2009), The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics (Edward Elgar, 2010), and Documents Related to John Maynard Keynes, Institutionalism at Chicago, and Frank H. Knight (Emerald, 2013). Selected articles are “James M. Buchanan and Frank H. Knight on Democracy as ‘Government by Discussion’” (Public Choice, 2020), “Reconsidering Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit” (The Independent Review, 2020), and “Two Trajectories of Democratic Capitalism in the Postwar Chicago School: Frank Knight versus Aaron Director” (Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2015). Emmett was Editor of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology (2003-2013), Vice-President of the History of Economics Society (2019-2021), and President (2021-2023). He received the Michigan State University Curricular Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Award in 2010.