“With Professor Glaeser, as we had with Professor Altshuler, we get someone who has a first-rate mind, is a terrific writer, and who appreciates the intersection between research and the world of practice,” said Taubman Center associate director David Luberoff, who will leave his current post to become Executive director of the Rappaport Institute this summer.

Indeed, Glaeser’s work points to a series of suggestions for urban officials.

One recent paper by the prolific professor attacks the theory that rent control reduces racial segregation.

Glaeser, asked to summarize his conclusions on housing regulations, eloquently explained: “Rent control is bad, bad, bad.”

“Rent control stymies the production of new rental housing and causes the dilapidation of existing rental units,” he said. “When you turn off the price mechanism, you get the wrong people in the wrong apartments.”

THE DISMAL SCIENCE

Every two years, the American Economics Association awards its prestigious John Bates Clark Medal to the country’s top economist under 40. Recent Harvard winners include Professor of Economics Andrei Shleifer ’82 and University President Lawrence H. Summers.

The past two times the medal has been doled out, Glaeser was widely considered to be in the running. Now 37, Glaeser will have his last chance at the honor next spring.

Glaeser said he has tried to ignore the speculation.

“You either forego a lot of domestic happiness or you figure out how to deal with this. It is a tremendous honor to be considered remotely in the running. But giving more mental weight to this is unwise,” Glaeser said.

Since earning his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1992, Glaeser’s production of economic literature has continued at a furious rate.

Not only is Glaeser “the world’s leading expert on urban economics,” Cutler wrote in an e-mail Saturday, but “he is also a leading expert on behavioral economics—the study of why people make the decisions they do, and how that plays out in markets.”

Among Glaeser’s most influential papers was a 2002 report, “The Political Economy of Hatred,” in which Glaeser applied the tools of his discipline to explain racial and ethnic animosity.

“The demand for hatred is shaped by the costs of being hateful,” Glaeser wrote. “People who interact frequently with minorities in peaceful market settings will find hatred a costly emotion.” Moreover, the professor argued, politicians will “supply” hatred as a means of garnering support for their policies.

Perhaps Glaeser’s research on mitigating the effects of hatred will come in handy as the Big Apple native enters the virulently pro-Red Sox Rappaport Institute.