Edward Glaeser
Edward Glaeser
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Edward Glaeser

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Edward Glaeser

Edward Ludwig Glaeser (born May 1, 1967) is an American economist and the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University. 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." Glaeser is known for his work showing the economic and social benefits of dense and abundant housing in cities.

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.

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