Richard L. Stroup (1943 to 2021) was a Research Fellow and founding Member of the Board of Advisors at the Independent Institute and Emeritus Professor of Economics at both Montana State University and North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D.in economics from the University 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), Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know about Wealth and Prosperity, and Natural Resources: Bureaucratic Myths and Environmental Management (with John Baden).