About Glenn
Loury is an academic economist who has been published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Vice President of the American Economics Association, and President of the Eastern Economics Association. In 2005 he won the John von Neumann Award(given annually by the Rajk László College of the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration to "an outstanding economist whose research has exerted a major influence on students of the College over an extended period of time.") He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. He has given the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford (2007), the James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton (2003), and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard (2000.) As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Contributions
How Mass Incarceration Undermines America's Democratic Way of Life
In the News
Publications
Explores the economics of diversity-enhancing policies.
Shows that – in the presence of continued social segregation and when human capital spillovers within social networks are important – the consequences of past discrimination may persist indefinitely, absent some racially egalitarian intervention. Concludes that under such conditions "color-blindness" – i.e. official indifference to race in the formulation of public policies – is NOT an adequate response to this problem, and that "affirmative action" (i.e. policies whose explicit objective is to create more equal social outcomes between racial groups) is ethically justified.
Develops an identity choice model within the context of a stereotyping-cum-signaling framework. The model allows us to explore implications of the fact that, when individuals can choose identity, then the distribution of abilities within distinct identity groups becomes endogenous. This is significant because, when identity is exogenous and if the ability distributions within groups are the same, then inequality of group reputations in equilibrium can only arise if there is a positive feedback between group reputation and individual human capital investment activities. The model implies that inequality deriving from stereotyping of endogenously constructed social groups is at least as great as the inequality that can emerge between exogenously given groups.
Develops a simple taste-discrimination model which illustrates these problems in the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.