Elise Brezis

Who is Elise Brezis?

Elise S. Brezis, professor of Economics at Bar-Ilan University, is the director of the Azrieli Center for Economic Policy. She has been the head of the Statistics division at the Research Department in the Bank of Israel, and from 1999 to 2003, she was the President of the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration. She holds a PhD in Economics from MIT. She has published articles in leading journals as the American Economic Review and the European Economic Review, in the Oxford Encyclopedia and in the New Palgrave.

Brezis is an economist who combines the ivory tower writing of academia with economic policy and pragmatic economics. Her comparative advantage is in the mix of analyzing real life, economic history, and macroeconomics. Brezis's values of anti-conformism have had a significant influence on her research. Her first works in economic history were on 18th century England and are where she developed the data on the balance of payment of the UK, data that did not exist before.

Her research interests are related to economic growth. Her main works are in two fields: the first is the interaction between sociology and economics emphasizing the stratification of society and focusing on the elites; the second is technology, demography and economic growth. In the former, she has been on the forefront of research in the field of elites. In the latter, her most cited work dealing with technology and growth on leapfrogging in international competition, a paper on the theory of cycles in national technological leadership that she worked on with Paul Krugman, published in the American Economic Review in 1993. She is also a fellow at the Minerva Center for Growth in Jerusalem and serves on the editorial board of Cliometrica.