John Connaughton was an American economist who served as a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, contributing to academic economics through his teaching and research across a career at one of the major public universities in the American South and making particular contributions to the study of regional economics and the economic development of North Carolina and the broader southeastern United States. He died in 2026 at the age of 77.
He was born John Connaughton in 1948 or 1949 and pursued graduate education in economics before joining the faculty at UNC Charlotte, the research university in the Charlotte metropolitan area that has grown from its founding in 1946 as an evening college into one of North Carolina’s largest universities and a significant research institution in one of the South’s most economically dynamic metropolitan areas. Charlotte, the largest city in North Carolina and the financial centre of the Carolinas, provides an extraordinary laboratory for regional economic analysis, its development from a mid-sized regional city into a major financial centre over the decades of his academic career giving economic observers and analysts in the city a front-row view of the processes of regional economic growth, industrial transformation, and metropolitan development that are central subjects of regional economics.
His research on North Carolina and southeastern regional economics contributed to the academic literature on how regional economies grow and change, the factors that attract or repel investment and employment across different types of regions, and the policy implications of regional economic analysis for state and local governments seeking to promote economic development and shared prosperity. Regional economics as a field sits at the intersection of macroeconomics, which focuses on national and international economic aggregates, and urban economics, which focuses on the economic organisation of cities and metropolitan areas, drawing tools from both to understand the specific dynamics of particular regions.
Teaching economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels across a long academic career contributed to the economic literacy of the students he taught, providing them with the analytical frameworks and the empirical understanding of economic processes that informed their subsequent careers in business, government, and the professions. Economics education at the university level has consequences that extend beyond the academic environment into the quality of economic decision-making in both the private sector and public policy, as the graduates of university economics programmes carry their training into the positions they hold.
He was remembered by the UNC Charlotte economics department and by the students and colleagues who had worked with him as a teacher and scholar of genuine commitment whose service to the university and to the study of North Carolina’s economic development was a consistent feature of his professional career. He was 77 years old.