Professor Cowen's books include The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better; Discover Your Inner Economist; Public Goods and Market Failures; Explorations in the New Monetary Economics; Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters; How the United States Supports the Arts; In Praise of Commercial Culture; What Price Fame?; Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures; Modern Principles of Economics: Microeconomics (with Alex Tabarrok); Modern Principles: Macroeconomics (with Alex Tabarrok); An Analysis of Proposals for Constitutional Change in New Zealand (with Penelope Brook Cowen and Alex Tabarrok); Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World; Markets in the Firm; Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding; Economic Welfare; and The Theory of Market Failure: A Critical Examination.

A contributor to numerous encyclopedias and other volumes, he is the author of nearly 100 scholarly articles and reviews, and his popular articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wilson Quarterly, Forbes, Utne Reader, Slate, Phi Beta Kappa Forum, National Post, Newsweek, and elsewhere.