Richard L. Stroup is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Adjunct Professor of Economics at North Carolina State University, and former Professor of Economics at Montana State University. He received his Ph.D.in economics from the of Washington, and during the Reagan administration, he served as Director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Department of Interior.

Co-Founder and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Property and Environment Research Center, he was one of the originators of the New Resource Economics, the academic approach popularly known as free-market environmentalism. He is co-editor (with Roger Meiners) of Cutting Green Tape: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law, and his other books include Eco-Nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment, Economics: Private and Public Choice (with James D. Gwartney, Russell S. Sobel and David A. MacPherson), and Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know about Wealth and Prosperity.