[2] Born in New York City, Glaeser was educated at the Collegiate School and Princeton University, where he received his AB in economics in 1988.

List were mentioned as reasons for which the American Economic Association began to award the John Bates Clark Medal annually in 2009.

"[10] Glaeser is known for his work showing the economic and social benefits of dense and abundant housing in cities.

[16] Glaeser admires many aspects of the work of Jane Jacobs; they both argue that "cities are good for the environment.

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.

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.

In recent years, Glaeser has argued that human capital explains much of the variation in urban and metropolitan level prosperity.

[26] In other work, he finds that human capital is associated with reductions in corruption and other improvements in government performance.

[27] 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.

[28] 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[29] had become difficult to obtain (since the 1970s).

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.

The middle class confront affordability issues that could be resolved by allowing for more new home constructions by removing zoning restrictions at the municipal level.

[11] In 2003, Glaeser collaborated with David Cutler and Jesse Shapiro on a research paper that attempted to explain why Americans had become more obese.