Herbert Glejser

Herbert Glejser (2 January 1938 – 20 January 2024) was a Belgian economist and econometrician. Early in his career, he became known for the Glejser test, a statistics test for heteroskedasticity he developed in 1969. He was an Economics professor in Belgium until 2003 and had been visiting professor in several US universities (MIT, Berkeley University, UCLA), as well as in Brazil, Germany and Israel. He was the founder and first editor of the European Economic Review, one of the oldest economics journals in Europe, with Jean Waelbroeck.

Biography

Early life Herbert Glejser was born on in Vienna, Austria, from a Jewish family. The Anschluss on forced his parents to flee from Austria and seek refuge in Belgium. The Glejser family obtained Belgian citizenship in 1955.

After his high school studies in Athénée royal de Bruxelles, Herbert Glejser started University at the age of 16, at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in the Social, Political and Economical Sciences Departement. Simultaneously, he enrolled in a degree in Business Engineering at the École de Commerce Solvay (now Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management). In 1958, aged 20, he received his BA in Commercial Engineering and in March 1963, then 25, completed his PhD in Economics.

Academic life In 1959, aged 21, Herbert Glejser was hired as Secretary and Research fellow at the Department in Applied Economics of ULB (DULBEA), the research centre of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Assistant Professor at the ULB from 1963, Herbert Glejser became a full Professor in Economics in 1969, aged 31.

His interest focused in applied statistics and macroeconomics and, in 1981, he became one of the few Belgian economists to support the devaluation of the Belgian franc, despite the views of the National Bank of Belgium. Glejser deemed this measure inevitable to save "this impossible monster the Belgian economy had become". The Belgian franc has later been devalued, in February 1982.

In Belgium, from 1969, Herbert Glejser taught in Brussels universities (ULB and VUB) and from 1974 at the Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, in Namur. Abroad, he has been visiting Professor in the United States, notably at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1970 and 1974, at University of California, Berkeley in 1970, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1991; in Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980-1981; in Germany at LMU Munich and in Brazil at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in 1996.

Council Member and Emeritus fellow of the European Economic Association from 1986 to 1990, Glejser has been a Consultant for the European Economic Community from 1993.

Honors and awards Herbert Glejser received the Fulbright Program scholarship in 1974, a visiting scholar grant in Harvard University for his project research on "Econometric analysis of American capital abroad". He was awarded a Professor Chair from the Francqui Foundation in 1982-1983, and won the Pommerehne Prize from the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI) in 2002 for his article Efficiency and inefficiency in the ranking in competitions: The case of the Queen Elisabeth Music Contest, co-written with economist Bruno Heyndels.

Glejser test Herbert Glejser published A New Test for Heteroskedasticity in March 1969 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association where he develops a new test for heteroskedasticity, derived from the Park test that had been published by Rolla Edward Park in Econometrica in 1966

Glejser measures his test against the Goldfeld–Quandt test (1965): "he new test seems to compare favourably, except perhaps in the case of large samples." Improvements to the Glejser test have later been developed by Kyung So Im and by José António Machado and João Santos Silva

In 2020, the Glejser test was used to test the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis.

European Economic Review

In 1969, Herbert Glejser and Jean Waelbroeck founded and became first editors of the European Economic Review (EER).

They remained sole editors from 1969 to 1986, while EER publishers changed from the International Association of Applied Economics (ASEPELT) to North-Holland, then Elsevier. Over this period of time, over 10'000 article pages were selected by ca. 2'000 peer reviewers. In 1986, Glejser and Waelbroeck were joined by Peter Neary and Agnar Sandmo as associated editors. Jean Waelbroeck remained co-Editor-in-chief until 1991, Herbert Glejser for 25 years, until 1993.