Housing supply and the future of our urban planet
Join us for this special Economica Coase lecture which this year will be delivered by Harvard academic Edward Glaeser.
Cities are economic powerhouses, but both the U.S. and U.K. fail to produce the housing and infrastructure that would enable their most productive cities to grow. Even the sunbelt metropolises that once provided an ocean of affordable housing in the U.S. have begun to look like the sclerotic housing markets of coastal America and England. While productivity in resident construction soared right after World War II, productivity in that sector fell dramatically after 1970. After that year, the regulatory process seems to allow only small and idiosyncratic building projects, which are built by small, relatively unproductive firms. Moreover, these small firms seem to produce little technological innovation. Public productivity also appears limited: infrastructure is extremely expensive and often poorly maintained. An overview of global reforms suggests that change is possible, but difficult when the change process is very inclusive.
Meet our speaker and chair
Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught microeconomic theory, and occasionally urban and public economics, since 1992. He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston for a decade.
Henry Overman (@henryoverman.bsky.social) is Professor of Economic Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE. He is also the Research Director of the Centre for Economic Performance and the Director of the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth.
More about this event
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Economica is LSE Department of Economics' in-house, international peer-reviewed academic journal, covering research in all branches of economics.
The Coase-Phillips Lectures are hosted jointly by the journal Economica and the Department of Economics.
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