David Coates (24 December 1946 – 7 August 2018) was a British-born American political economist.
Coates earned an undergraduate degree at the University of York in 1967 and completed a D.Phil.
at the University of Oxford in 1979.
He began teaching prior to earning an advanced degree, serving as lecturer at the University of York from 1970 to 1971, and moving to the University of Leeds in 1977.
Coates left Leeds in 1995 for the University of Manchester, and became the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University in 1999.