Kevin Dowd is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a professor of finance and economics at Durham University in England. Dowd has written extensively on the history and theory of free banking/private money, central banking, financial regulation, and commodity monetary systems. His books include Private Money: The Path to Monetary Stability, The State and the Monetary System, Laissez-Faire Banking, Competition and Finance: A New Interpretation of Financial and Monetary Economics, and Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking. and New Private Monies – A Bit Part Player? He is the author of a highly regarded finance text Measuring Market Risk, and in recent years has done work on financial risk management, pensions, and mortality modeling. He is also the co-author with Martin Hutchinson of Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System (Wiley, 2010). Dowd, and also has affiliations with the Cobden Centre, Institute of Economic Affairs, Independent Institute, and Instituto Bruno Leoni.

Dowd holds a PhD in economics from Sheffield University.