Glenn Cartman Loury was born on September 3,1948 in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, growing up in a redlined neighborhood. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, writing his dissertation, “Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income”, under the supervision of Robert M. Solow.

Loury became an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern University after receiving his Ph.D. He moved to teach at the University of Michigan, and was promoted as the full professor of economics in 1980. At the age of 33, he became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.Loury’s areas of study include applied microeconomic theory: welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution.