Originally from Galveston, Texas, Ekelund attended St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, earning his B.B.A. in economics in 1962 and his M.A. in economics and history the next year. He was a member of the Order of the Barons and first worked as an instructor in economics while completing his master's degree.

He then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to teach and continue his graduate work at Louisiana State University. He finished his Ph.D. in economics and political theory there in 1967. His doctoral dissertation was on Jules Dupuit, a French civil engineer and economist. Ekelund would maintain this interest in Dupuit, making him the topic of a dozen journal articles and a 1999 book, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers.

In 1967, after the completion of his Ph.D., Ekelund was hired by Texas A&M University economics department. He 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 Lowder Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Auburn University and is a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. 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.

Textbooks by Ekelund have sold successfully, with his and Robert Tollison's Economics now in a seventh edition. He also earned a place in the Who's Who in Economics and has been actively involved with the Southern Economic Association since serving as its vice-president in 1984.

Ekelund's 1981 book with Tollison, Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society, is cited as an exemplar of the school of thought that argues that mercantilism, rather than being the result of miscalculation, was a system designed by rent-seekers to enforce public policy favorable towards themselves.

Dupuit and the French engineers

His 1999 collaboration with Hébert, Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics, has been praised for publicizing the theoretical and applied achievements of Jules Dupuit and others whose work in economics was often previously overlooked as mere engineering literature. In his review, economist Marcel Boumans of the University of Amsterdam asserts, "For too long they were neglected in the history of economics. Ekelund and Hebert's tribute to their work remedies this shortcoming." According to a July 1999 book review in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology,

The book succeeds in staking out a claim for Dupuit as one of the founders of formal economic theory and reasoning. This is a stellar performance and a book that will shake up the historiography of the discipline for decades to come. At future professional meetings we shall debate the origins of modern neoclassical economics: British or French?

Economics of religion

Sacred Trust and The Marketplace of Christianity have both spawned debate among those interested in one of the latest new "fields" in economics...the economics of religion. Economist John Wells argues in his March 1998 Journal of Markets and Morality review of Sacred Trust that,

The upshot from each of the chapters is that the Church consistently sought after profits and responded to economic incentives in a manner consonant with modern economic analysis. Taken as a whole, they propose numerous challenges to those who maintain a public-interest approach to Church history.

In his Chronicle of Higher Education review of The Marketplace of Christianity, David Glenn notes that arguments in the book that Westerners have demanded “cheaper” religions over time are at odds with assertions by economist Laurence R. Iannaccone that "strict churches are strong." Barry R. Chiswick in his 2009 review of the book in the Journal of Economic Literature, notes that Ekelund and his cohorts use income, education, the state of science and full price of alternative religious beliefs to predict the types of religions chosen. Factors affecting demand and risk profiles between mainline Protestant religions, on the one hand, and fundamentalist and traditionalist Roman Catholics, on the other relate

...to the issues of sex, including sexual behavior and identity (e.g., premarital sex, homosexuality and procreation (e.g., birth control, abortion). These issues are dividing Christianity within the developed countries, and between Christians in the developed and less-developed countries. It is because of sharp differences in views on these issues and doctrinal rigidity that schisms have emerged in some Protestant denominations and [the authors] predict a schism (or several schisms) in the Roman Catholic Church. These schisms, responding to heterogeneous demanders, increase the extent of product differentiation in this market.

Chiswick concludes that schisms are beneficial and that "[t]hese ideas seem to be particularly relevant in the current period where religious fundamentalism and liberalism/individualism are clashing to various degrees in all the world’s religions. The application of microeconomic theory that is so successfully applied here to one major development in Christianity can, in principle, be applied to these other religions as well."

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.

He is also a classically-trained pianist and has recorded two albums for which he played the Mises Institute's Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand Piano, Solace, also called For The Piano, and Reverie, performing works by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Ravel, Grieg, Scott Joplin and others. He has been a contestant in the 2008 and 2009 Van Cliburn Amateur YouTube Competition. An album, The Three B's was produced in 2010, and contains works by Bach (Two-Part Inventions, Prelude and Fugue XVI, and Selections from French Suite No 5 in G Major), Beethoven (Sonata, Op. 10, #1), and Brahms (Zwei Rhapsodien, Op. 79, and two Intermezzi).

As author

• A History of Economic Theory and Method with Robert F. Hébert. (available in Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese, and Portuguese editions) McGraw-Hill, 1975. (ISBN 0-0701-9143-3; 5th edition, Waveland Press. 2007, ISBN 57766-486-8)
• Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective with Robert Tollison. Texas A&M University Press, 1981.
• The Essentials of Money and Banking with Leonardo Auernheimer. John Wiley & Sons, 1982.
• Macroeconomics with Charles DeLorme. Business Publications, 1983.
• Economics: Private Markets and Public Choice with Robert Tollison. Little, Brown, and Company, 1986. (7th Edition. Addison-Wesley-Longman, 2006. ISBN 0-321-33630-5)
• Advertising and the Market Process: A Modern Economic View with David Saurman. Pacific Institute, 1988.
• A History of Economic Theory and Method, with Robert F. Hébert, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990
• Intermediate Macroeconomics with Charles D. DeLorme and Dennis Jansen. West Educational Publishing, 1994.
• Intermediate Microeconomics: Price Theory and Applications with Richard Ault. D. C. Heath, 1995.
• Classics in Economic Thought with Robert F. Hébert. McGraw-Hill, 1996.
• Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism with Robert Tollison. Texas A&M University Press, 1997. (ISBN 0-8909-6745-8)
• Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics: Dupuit and the Engineers with Robert F. Hébert. University of Chicago Press, March 1999. (ISBN 0-2261-9999-1)
• Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm with Robert F. Hébert, Robert Tollison, Gary Anderson, and Audrey Davidson. Oxford University Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-1951-0337-8)
• Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War with Mark Thornton. Scholarly Resource Books, 2004. (ISBN 0-8420-2961-3)
• The Persistence of Myth and Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Mexican Art with Catherine Walsh. Taylor Museum of Art, 2004.
• The Marketplace of Christianity with Robert F. Hébert and Robert D. Tollison. (available in Italian) MIT Press, November 2006. (ISBN 0-2620-5082-X)
• Economic Origins of Roman Christianity with Robert D. Tollison. University of Chicago Press (forthcoming Fall 2011).

As editor

• The Evolution of Modern Demand Theory: A Collection of Essays with Eirik G. Furubotn and W. P. Gramm. D. C. Heath and Co., 1972
• The Foundations of Regulatory Economics in 3 volumes. Edward Elgar, 1988.