Edward Glaeser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward L. Glaeser (born May 1, 1967) is an economist. 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 1993, 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.
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[edit] "A Jack of all Trades"
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." [1]
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.
[edit] Contribution to Urban Economics
Glaeser's empirical research has offered a distinct explanation for the secular increase in housing prices in many parts of the United States over the past several decades. A number of pundits and commentators attribute the skyrocketing housing prices in recent times to a housing bubble created by the monetary policies of Alan Greenspan. Glaeser points out that the increase in housing prices have not been uniform throughout the country. In fact, the most dramatic increases have occuried in places like Boston, Massachusetts or San Francisco, California where permits for new buildings have been hard to come by since the 1970s. This, compounds with their strident zoning laws, seriously disrupted the supply of new housings in those places, making the real estate markets incapable of accommodating the increasing demands, hence resulting in skyrocketing housing prices. Glaeser also points to the fact that while states like Arizona and Texas also experienced tremendous growth in demand for real estates, the housing prices there did not exprience abnormal increase thanks to the loosen regulations and feasibility of obtaining new building permits in those states.
[edit] 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,[2] 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."
[edit] Undergraduate Teaching
At Harvard, Glaeser regularly teaches an undergraduate course on intermediate microeconomic theory,[3].
[edit] Popular writings
In 2006 Glaeser began writing a regular column for the New York Sun.
