Gary A. Hoover (born August 1968) is an American professor of economics and director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. From January 2015 until December 2020 he was a professor and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Oklahoma. He was the first and only African American ever hired in that department. In August 1998 he joined the Department of Economics, Finance and Legal Studies at the University of Alabama. He was the first and only African American ever hired in that department, on the tenure track. He was tenured in August 2004 and in 2005 became the Assistant Dean for Graduate Student and Faculty Development in the Culverhouse College of Commerce while maintaining full teaching and research duties. He was granted full professor in August 2010. In March 2017 he founded and became the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy. He has published extensively on race and inequality in the United States, and is a leading scholar on plagiarism and other types of misconduct in the economics profession. Education and early life Hoover was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After attending Rufus King High School, he joined the Army in 1986 and was assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado. He used funding from the G.I. Bill to pay for his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he completed a B.A. degree in economics in 1993, followed by M.A. and PhD degrees in economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1995 and 1998. Career Hoover taught at the University of Alabama from 1998 until 2014, where he was a William White McDonald Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow from 2006 - 2014. He joined the University of Oklahoma as chair of the Department of Economics in January 2015 and was appointed a President's Associates Presidential Professor in 2017. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Economics, Race and Policy. From 2018 until 2020 he was the vice president of the Southern Economic Association. Since 2013 he has been co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession. Research Poverty/Income Distribution Research His earlier works dealt mostly with local government operations and efficiencies. He published works examining how different cities distributed liquor licenses based on demand side factors and how different cities benefited from labor cost savings by privatizing their refuse removal services. He would continue