Edward Glaeser Popular Books

Edward Glaeser Biography & Facts

Edward Ludwig Glaeser (born May 1, 1967) is an American economist who is currently the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he is also the Chairman of the Department of Economics. He directs the Cities Research Programme at the International Growth Centre.Born in New York City, Glaeser was educated at the Collegiate School and Princeton University, where he received his AB in economics in 1988. After receiving a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1992, he joined the faculty of Harvard University. He has served as the director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and as the director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston (both at Harvard Kennedy School). He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal. He also chairs the Advisory Council of the Liveable London unit at Policy Exchange. Glaeser and John A. List were mentioned as reasons for which the American Economic Association began to award the John Bates Clark Medal annually in 2009.Glaeser has been a faculty research fellow at the NBER since 1993, and was an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics from 1998 to 2008. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2005, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.According to a review in The New York Times, his book Triumph of the City summarises 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 (1930-September 27, 2006) and Elizabeth 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 Glaeser received a degree in architecture from the Darmstadt University of Technology, and a PhD in art history from the Free University of Berlin, before joining the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1963. He would go on to become Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design in 1969.Of his father, Glaeser said "his passion for cities and buildings nurtured my own". Glaeser described how his father supported new construction and change if it met aesthetic standards. According to Glaeser, his father "disliked dreary postwar apartment buildings and detested ugly suburban communities"; Glaeser himself thought that while “much postwar construction may be dull”, the buildings allowed “millions of Americans to live in the way that they desired”. 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 influenced by his mother, Elizabeth Glaeser, who was Head of Capital Markets at Mobil for 20 years, before joining Deloitte & Touche as Director of Corporate Risk Practice. She earned an MBA degree when Edward was ten years old and occasionally brought him to her classes. He remembers her teaching him microeconomic concepts, such as marginal cost price theory.Glaeser admires many aspects of the work of Jane Jacobs; they both argue that "cities are good for the environment." He disagrees with her on densification through height. He advocates for higher buildings in cities while Jacobs deplored the 1950s and 1960s public housing projects inspired by Le Corbusier. The austere, dehumanizing New York high rises eventually became the "projects" straying far from their original intent. She believed in preserving West Greenwich Village's smaller historical buildings for personal, economic and aesthetic reasons. Glaeser grew up in a high rise and believes that higher buildings provide more affordable housing. He calls for elimination or lessening of height limitation restrictions, preservationist statutes and other zoning laws. Writings Glaeser has published almost five articles per year since 1992 in leading peer-reviewed academic economics journals, in addition to many books, other 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 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, the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics praised Glaeser as a "genius", and Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate in economics, 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 (especially price theory and game theory) to questions of 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 papers in applied economics are co-written with his Harvard colleague, Andrei Shleifer. 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. Although his most recent book, Triumph of the City (2011), celebrates the city, he moved with his wife and children to the suburbs around 2006 because of "home interest deduction, highway infrastructure and local school systems". He explained that this move is further "evidence of how public policy stacks the deck against cities. [B]ecause of all the good that comes out of city life—both personal and municipal—people should take a hard look at the policies that are driving residents into the suburbs. 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 black 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 from white youth on three of four measures and only slightly different on the fourth.In 2000 Glaeser, Kahn and Rappaport challenged the 1960s urban land use theory .... Discover the Edward Glaeser popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Edward Glaeser books.