Edward Glaeser

Edward Glaeser
Born	(1967-05-01) May 1, 1967 Manhattan, New York
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University University of Chicago
Scientific career
Fields	Economics
Institutions	Harvard University

Edward Ludwig "Ed" Glaeser (born May 1, 1967) is an economist at Harvard University. He was educated at The Collegiate School in New York City before obtaining his B.A. in economics from Princeton University and his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. Glaeser joined the faculty of Harvard in 1992, where he is currently Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor at the Department of Economics and Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston (both at the Kennedy School of Government), in addition to being an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Glaeser's connections with both Chicago and Harvard makes him a linkage between the Chicago School and the Cambridge School of Economics. Glaeser and John A. List were prominent names mentioned as reasons why the AEA committee began to award the Clark Medal annually in 2009.

He is the author of the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, which was published by Penguin Press in 2011. According to a review in the New York Times, the book summarizes Glaeser's years of research into the role that cities play in fostering human achievement and "is at once polymathic and vibrant."

Family Background and Influence

Glaeser was born in Manhattan New York to Ludwig Glaeser (Born: 1930; Died: September 27, 2006) and Elizabeth Jones Glaeser. His father was born in Berlin in 1930, lived in Berlin during World War II, and moved to West Berlin in the 1950s. Ludwig received a degree in architecture from Technische Universitat and a Ph.D. in art history from the Free University of Berlin before joining the staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1963. He would go to be curator of the Department of Architecture and Design in 1969.

Edward wrote of his father, "His passion for cities and buildings nurtured my own," and he described how his father supported new construction and change if it met aesthetic standards. According to Edward, Ludwig also "disliked dreary postwar apartment buildings and detested ugly suburban communities," though Edward, himself found much to admire in sprawl in so far as it facilitates "the ability of people to live as they choose." Yet, Glaeser's work also argues against local anti-density zoning laws and federal government policies that encourage sprawl, such as the mortgage tax deduction and federal highway programs.

Glaeser's career was also reportedly influenced by his mother Elizabeth Jones Glaeser, who worked for the John D Rockefeller 3rd Foundation. She earned a M.B.A. degree when Edward was ten years old and occasionally brought him to her classes. He fondly remembers her teaching him microeconomics lessons, such as marginal cost price theory.

"A jack of all trades"

Glaeser has published at a rate of almost five articles per year since 1992 in leading peer-reviewed academic economics journals, in addition to many other books, articles, blogs, and op-eds. Glaeser has made substantial contributions to the empirical study of urban economics. In particular, his work examining the historical evolution of economic hubs like Boston and New York City has had major influence on both economics and urban geography. Glaeser also has written widely on a variety of other topics, ranging from social economics to the economics of religion, from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

His work has earned the admiration of a number of prominent economists. George Akerlof (2001 Economics Nobel Prize) praised Glaeser as a "genius," and Gary Becker (1992 Economics Nobel Prize) commented that before Glaeser "urban economics was dried up. No one had come up with some new ways to look at cities."

Despite the seeming disparateness of the topics he has examined, most of Glaeser's work can be said to apply economic theory (and especially price theory and game theory) to explain human economic and social behavior. Glaeser develops models using these tools and then evaluates them with real world data, so as to verify their applicability. A number of his most influential papers in applied economics are co-written with his Harvard colleague, Andrei Shleifer.

Contribution to urban economics and political economy

Glaeser has published in leading economic journals on many topics in the field of urban economics.

In early work, he found that, over decades, industrial diversity contributes more to economic growth than specialization, which contrasts with work by other urban economists like Vernon Henderson of Brown University.

He has published influential studies on inequality. His work with David Cutler of Harvard identified harmful effects of segregation on African-American youth in terms of wages, joblessness, education attainment, and likelihood of teen pregnancy. They found that the effect of segregation was so harmful to Blacks that if Black youth lived in perfectly integrated metropolitan areas, their success would be no different than White youth on three of the four measures and only slightly different on the fourth. In a book with fellow Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, he argues that policies to reduce inequality and poverty are less common in the United States than in Europe because of the United States' racial and economic diversity undermines sympathy for strangers.

He has also made important contributions in the field of social capital by identifying underlying economic incentives for social association and volunteering. For example, he and a colleague found that homeowners are more engaged citizens than renters. In experimental work, he found that students who report being more trusting, act in ways that are more trustworthy.

In recent years, Glaeser has argued that human capital explains much of the variation in urban and metropolitan level prosperity." He has extended the argument to the international level, arguing that the high levels of human capital, embodied by European settlers in the new world and elsewhere, explains the development of freer institutions and economic growth in those countries over centuries. In other work, he finds that human capital is associated with reductions in corruption and other improvements in government performance.

During the 2000s, Glaeser's empirical research has offered a distinctive explanation for the increase in housing prices in many parts of the United States over the past several decades. A number of pundits and commentators attribute skyrocketing housing prices to a housing bubble created by the monetary policies of Alan Greenspan. Glaeser points out that the increase in housing prices has not been uniform throughout the country. In fact, the most dramatic increases have occurred in places like Boston, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California, where permits for new buildings have been difficult to obtain since the 1970s. This, compounded with strict zoning laws, seriously disrupted the supply of new housing in these cities. Real estate markets were thus unable to accommodate increases in demand, and housing prices skyrocketed. Glaeser also points to the experience of states such as Arizona and Texas, which experienced tremendous growth in demand for real estate during the same period but, thanks to looser regulations and the comparative ease of obtaining new building permits, did not witness abnormal increases in housing prices.

Contribution to health economics

In 2003 Glaeser collaborated with David Cutler and Jesse Shapiro on a research paper that attempted to explain why Americans had become more obese. According to the abstract of their paper, Americans have become more obese over the past 25 years because they "have been consuming more calories. The increase in food consumption is itself the result of technological innovations which made it possible for food to be mass prepared far from the point of consumption, and consumed with lower time costs of preparation and cleaning. Price changes are normally beneficial, but may not be if people have self-control problems."

Undergraduate teaching

At Harvard, Glaeser regularly teaches an undergraduate course on intermediate microeconomic theory.

Popular writings

In 2006 Glaeser began writing a regular column for the New York Sun. He writes a monthly column for the Boston Globe. He blogs frequently for the New York Times at Economix, and he has written essays for the New Republic.

External links

• Glaeser on the differences between U.S and European welfare policies
• Glaeser's homepage at the Harvard department of economics
• Podcast featuring Glaeser Glaeser discusses paternalism on EconTalk.