Edward L. Glaeser

A pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of citiesAmerica is an urban nation, yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly . . . or are they? In this revelatory book, Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist, declares that cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live. He travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and cogent argument, Glaeser makes an urgent, eloquent case for the city's importance and splendor, offering inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest creation and our best hope for the future.

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only acceleratedCities can make us sick. They always have—diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. Cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice and crime from Sodom and Gomorrah on. But cities have flourished nonetheless because they are humanity’s greatest invention, indispensable engines for creativity, innovation, wealth, and connection, the loom on which the fabric of civilization is woven.But cities now stand at a crossroads. During the global COVID crisis, cities grew silent as people worked from home—if they could work at all. The normal forms of socializing ground to a halt. How permanent are these changes? Advances in digital technology mean that many people can opt out of city life as never before. Will they? Are we on the brink of a post-urban world?City life will survive but individual cities face terrible risks, argue Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, and a wave of urban failure would be absolutely disastrous. In terms of intimacy and inspiration, nothing can replace what cities offer. Great cities have always demanded great management, and our current crisis has exposed fearful gaps in our capacity for good governance. It is possible to drive a city into the ground, pandemic or not. Glaeser and Cutler examine the evolution that is already happening, and describe the possible futures that lie before What will distinguish the cities that will flourish from the ones that won’t? In America, they argue, deep inequities in health care and education are a particular blight on the future of our cities; solving them will be the difference between our collective good health and a downward spiral to a much darker place.

Despite the recent drop in house prices, housing remains unaffordable for many ordinary Americans. Particularly along the coasts, housing remains extremely expensive. In Rethinking Federal Housing How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable , Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko explain why housing is so expensive in some areas and outline a plan for making it more affordable.Policymakers must recognize that conditions differ across housing markets, so housing policies need to reflect those differences. The poor and the middle class do not struggle with the same affordability issues, so housing policy needs to address each problem differently. The poor cannot afford housing simply because their incomes are low; the solution to that problem is direct income transfers to the poor, rather than interference with the housing market.In contrast, housing is unaffordable for the middle class because of local zoning restrictions on new home construction that limit the supply of suitable housing. The federal government can sensibly address this issue by providing incentives for local governments in these markets to allow more construction.Ironically, current subsidies for construction of low-income housing only tie impoverished Americans to areas where they have limited job prospects. These supply subsidies also crowd out private-sector construction and benefit politically-connected developers. Mortgage interest deductions, which are intended to make housing more affordable for the middle class, simply allow families who can already afford a house to purchase a bigger one. In restricted, affluent markets, these deductions increase the amount families can pay for a house, driving up prices even higher.Glaeser and Gyourko propose a comprehensive overhaul of federal housing policy that takes into account local regulations and economic conditions. Reform of the home mortgage interest deduction would provide incentives to local governments to allow the market to provide more housing, preventing un

220 million Americans crowd together in the 3% of the country that is urban. 35 million people live in the vast metropolis of Tokyo, the most productive urban area in the world. The central city of Mumbai alone has 12 million people, and Shanghai almost as many. We choose to live cheek by jowl, in a planet with vast amounts of space. Yet despite all of the land available to us, we choose to live in proximity to cities. Using economics to understand this phenomenon, the urban economist uses the tools of economic theory and empirical data to explain why cities exist and to analyze urban issues such as housing, education, crime, poverty and social interaction.Drawing on the success of his Lindahl lectures, Edward Glaeser provides a rigorous account of his research and unique thinking on cities. Using a series of simple models and economic theory, Glaeser illustrates the primary features of urban economics including the concepts of spatial equilibrium and agglomeration economies. Written for a mathematically inclined audience with an interest in urban economics and cities, the book is written to be accessible to theorists and non-theorists alike and should provide a basis for further empirical work.

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Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led thatcity to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurshipand city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growthof start-ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution.