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Robert Burton Ekelund, Jr. (born 1940) is an American economist.

In 1967, after the completion of his Ph.D., Ekelund was hired by Texas A&M University economics department. He was made Professor of Economics in 1974 and remained on the faculty of the College Station, Texas school until 1979, when he moved to Auburn, Alabama to become a professor at Auburn University. Ekelund was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and in 2003 he served as the Vernon Taylor Distinguished Visiting Professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Ekelund is now Catherine and Edward Lowder Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Auburn University and is a policy advisor to the Heartland. He is also an Independent Institute research fellow and an adjunct faculty member of the Mises Institute.

Economic topics notably discussed by Ekelund include the history of economic thought, the economics of regulation, the economics of religion, public choice theory,mercantilism, and the economics of the American Civil War blockades.

In addition to his work in economics, Ekelund is an artist who has shown regularly in juried and other shows over the past two decades with solo and joint exhibitions in Alabama. Ekelund has also designed book covers for the University of Chicago Press and Edward Elgar Publishing in London. He is an avid art collector and curator whose collection has been exhibited in several museums. He was a founding member of the advisory board for the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, Alabama and was the museum's acting co-director from 2006 to 2007 and chairman of the Advisory Board from 2010 to 2012.

He is also a classically trained pianist and has recorded three albums for which he played Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano, Solace (also called For The Piano), Reverie, and Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, performing works by Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, Grieg, Scott Joplin and others. He has been a contestant in the 2008, 2009 and 2012 Van Cliburn Amateur Competition and he created an homage to Chopin's 200th birthday on YouTube. His album Bach, Beethoven, Brahms was produced in 2010, along with a prelude by Claude Debussy from Book I in 2013.