Charles Baird is a professor of economics emeritus at California State University at East Bay.
He specializes in the law and economics of labor relations, a subject on which he has published several articles in refereed journals and numerous shorter pieces with FEE.
H received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. He then spent five years on the faculty at UCLA where he actually learned economics, mainly from Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz. At Berkeley he was trained to be a big-government interventionist. At UCLA he became a small-government classical liberal, and has continued as such to this day.
He was a Professor of Economics at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) from 1973 to his retirement in July 2007. He was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Business and Economics from 2005 - 2007. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Universidad Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala.
He is a member, and a past Vice President and Board Director, of the Mont Pelerin Society. He was the founding Director of the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at CSUEB. The principal mission of the Smith Center is to foster a better understanding of free market principles and their application to public policy.
