Career
His book Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (1977; paperback edition 1980) Nominated for the American Historical Association's Beveridge Award.
He is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute (since September 1994), and is editor of The Independent Review (since 1995). He is an adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Higgs received his Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University, and has held teaching positions at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, and Seattle University. He has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University. Higgs held a visiting professorship at the University of Economics, Prague in 2006, and has supervised dissertations in the Ph.D. program at Universidad Francisco Marroquín.