, Glaeser has published 139 papers in peer-reviewed academic economics journals. Glaeser has made 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. 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. 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." In 2000 Glaeser, Kahn and Rappaport challenged the 1960s urban land use theory that claimed the poor live disproportionately in cities because richer consumers who wanted more land chose to live in the suburbs where available land was less expensive. They found that the reasons for the higher rate of poverty in cities (17% in 1990) compared to suburbs (7.4%) in the United States were the accessibility of public transportation and pro-poor central cities' policies which encouraged more poor people to choose to move to and live in central cities. He reiterated this in an interview in 2011, "The fact that there is urban poverty is not something cities should be ashamed of. Because cities don't make people poor. Cities attract poor people. They attract poor people because they deliver things that people need most of all—economic opportunity." 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. Unlike many pundits and commentators, who attribute skyrocketing housing prices to a
housing bubble created by
Alan Greenspan's monetary policies, Glaeser pointed out that the increase in housing prices was not uniform throughout the country (Glaeser and Gyourko 2002). Glaeser and Gyourko (2002) argued that while the price of housing was significantly higher than construction costs in
Boston, Massachusetts and San Francisco and California, in most of the United States, the price of housing remained "close to the marginal, physical costs of new construction." They argued that dramatic differences in price of housing versus construction costs occurred in places where permits for new buildings had become difficult to obtain (since the 1970s). Compounded with strict zoning laws the supply of new housing in these cities was seriously disrupted. 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, because of looser regulations and the comparative ease of obtaining new building permits, did not witness abnormal increases in housing prices. Glaeser (2011) claimed that public policy in
Houston, Texas, the only city in the United States with no
zoning code and therefore, a very elastic housing supply, enabled construction to respond to the demand of a plentiful number of new affordable houses even in 2006. He argued that this kept Houston prices flat while elsewhere they escalated. Glaeser has made contributions in the field of
social capital by identifying underlying economic incentives for social association and volunteering. For example, he and colleague Denise DiPasquale found that homeowners are more engaged citizens than renters. In experimental work, he found that students reporting being more trusting also act in more trustworthy ways.
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, "Why Have Americans Become More Obese?", 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." ==References==