Boudreaux received a Doctor of Philosophy in economics from Auburn University in 1986 with a thesis on “Contracting, Organization, and Monetary Instability: Studies in the Theory of the Firm.” He received a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1992.
He is publicly known as a libertarian. Boudreaux was an Assistant Professor of Economics at George Mason University from 1985 to 1989. He is now Professor of Economics at George Mason University, where he served as chairman of the Economics Department from 2001 to 2009.
During the Spring 1996 semester he was an Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at the Cornell Law School.
Boudreaux is now an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank. Boudreaux has lectured in the United States, Latin America, and Europe on topics including the nature of law, antitrust law and economics, and international trade.
He spoke at an Institute for Economic Studies seminar on Europe & Liberty in Deva, Romania, in 2007. He spoke at the Freedom Summit in 2001 and 2010.
Boudreaux has publicly criticized Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman, stating that Krugman frequently "commits elementary errors" when discussing economics.
Boudreaux argued in October 2009 that insider trading “is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors..Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.”
In a January 2013 article for the Wall Street Journal, Boudreaux and Mark Perry argued that the “progressive trope.. that America"s middle class has stagnated economically since the 1970s” is “spectacularly wrong.” In a similar vein Boudreaux and Liya Palagashvili published an article in the Wall Street Journal in March 2014 discussing recent scholarship which shows that, contrary to what had been reported before by, wages have not decoupled from productivity in the United States and Britain.
