Roy Cordato

Senior Economist and Resident Scholar
Roy Cordato is Senior Economist and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation. From January 2001 to March 2017, he held the position of Vice President for Research at the Locke Foundation. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Economics at North Carolina State University where he teaches “Political Economy of the Market Process,” a course that he designed. In addition, he is faculty advisor for the Austrian Economics Forum and the Society for Politics, Economics, and the Law, both at N.C. State University.

From 1993-2000 Cordato served as the Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C. From 1987 to 1993 he was Senior Economist at the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET) in Washington, D.C. He has served as full-time economics faculty at the University of Hartford and at Auburn University and as adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include a 1992 book, Welfare Economics and Externalities in an Open Ended Universe (Kluwer Academic Publishers republished in 2007 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute).

His articles have appeared in a number of economics journals and law reviews in addition to The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, The Journal of Commerce, The Congressional Record, The Orange County Register, The Freeman, Human Events, National Review Online, The Washington Examiner, Tax Notes and many other newspapers and magazines. In 2000 he received the Freedoms Foundation’s Leavey Award in Free Enterprise Education. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and former executive board member of The Association of Private Enterprise Education. Cordato holds an M.A. in urban and regional economics from the University of Hartford and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He also holds a Bachelors of Music Education from the Hartt School of Music.

Posts by Roy Cordato (page 1)

  • When y’all means none of y’all

    My guess is that the irony totally escapes the owners of this establishment.
    Roy Cordato, June 29, 2017

  • Look no further than film incentives, solar subsidies, and the recent vote on craft freedom

    From Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, 1949, pp. 865-866. (To understand this passage in terms of the Orwellian language that dominates modern politics in North Carolina and elsewhere substitute the word stakeholders for Mises’ use of the phrase “pressure groups.”) The public looks askance upon the lobbyists and blames…
    Roy Cordato, May 19, 2017

  • Trade policy should be about consumers

    This is an open letter from my friend Professor Don Boudreaux at George Mason University to Congressman Sherrod Brown of Ohio, published at Professor Boudreaux’s popular Cafe’ Hayek blog (Emphasis is mine). It makes a very important and usually missed point about trade and trade policy. “Mr.
    Roy Cordato, May 18, 2017

  • Norman B. Ture’–A true understanding of supply side economics

    As the late Dr. Norman Ture’, one of the founding fathers of modern supply side economics explains, what most people, even many economists, don’t understand is that supply side economics is a methodological approach to answering certain kinds of questions in economics. These are primarily questions related to the…
    Roy Cordato, May 16, 2017

  • A (very) brief comment on the US House Tax Plan

    In general the House tax plan is consistent with sound economic reasoning on tax policy—flattening and lowering personal rates and eliminating the AMT are important and long overdue. The 50% exclusion on investment income—capital gains, interest, and dividends—will help to ameliorate, although not eliminate, the income tax’s bias…
    Roy Cordato, March 1, 2017

  • NC goes from 31 to 14 in small business index

    The latest Small Business Policy Index published by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council has ranked North Carolina as 14th best in the nation for having a conducive policy environment for small business and for “entrepreneurial friendliness.” The index is based heavily on personal and business taxes. The…
    Roy Cordato, February 16, 2017

  • 11 years with less than 3% growth–2 1/2 times any other stretch

    As of the end of 2016 the US has gone 11 years, since 2006, with less than 3% economic growth. 2016 had a pitiful 1.6% growth rate, less than 2015.  According to CNSnews: prior to this period, the longest stretch of years when real GDP did not grow by at…
    Roy Cordato, January 27, 2017

  • A look at global temperature change 1998-2016

    The data is through December 2016. While 2016 is statistically tied with 1998 the 18 year trend is still flat. See here.
    Roy Cordato, January 19, 2017