Partner
Leonard Hausman has been engaged in business in recent years, principally in China, but also in India and Saudi Arabia. Hausman is a co-founder of two companies, Boston Healthcare Ventures (BHV) and University Central (UC). Prior to his involvement in business, Hausman taught economics and developed academic research centers at three universities in Boston. From 1988 to 1998, Hausman founded and directed the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He created the Institute, and made it the largest program on contemporary affairs in the Middle East at any university in the world. The work of the Institute led to building large networks of businesspeople, academics, other professionals, and government officials throughout the Middle East, the EU, and North America. The Institute prepared the political and intellectual foundation for the trade agreement that the Israelis and the Palestinians signed in Paris in April of 1994, an agreement which remains in effect until today. With Stanley Fischer, currently deputy head of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US, Anna Karasik Thurow, and Thomas C. Schelling, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, Hausman wrote and edited, Securing Peace in the Middle East: Project on Economic Transition, published by the MIT Press. The Institute also developed the Middle East Educational Fellowship Program. Under this program, roughly 100 Arabs and Israelis were brought to Harvard, and obtained master’s degrees from its Kennedy School of Government and its School of Public Health. Hausman taught economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
From 1988 to 1993, Hausman founded and led the East Asia Management Studies Center at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Hausman worked closely with Lester Thurow, then dean of the Sloan School, to launch two very large projects, one with Singapore and the other with Taiwan. Working with Dean Thurow, Hausman launched the first major programs at MIT with countries in East Asia, including education programs in China with the management schools at its leading universities. While Hausman was on the faculty of Brandeis University, he assembled colleagues from several of the leading universities in the Boston area, several major firms in the US in banking, insurance, and computers, and from the US Government, to offer executive education in Beijing during five summers. The students in these summer programs were officials from several Chinese government ministries whose mandate was the reform of various aspects of social protection. The executive education programs were about reforms in China’s labor market; the development in 1986 of China’s first unemployment insurance program; and safety net programs for the elderly. Hausman began his work in China in 1982, working with the minister of what then was called the Ministry of Labor and Personnel. From 1970 to 1988, Hausman was on the faculty, teaching economics, and holding the Hexter Chair, at Brandeis University. His field of expertise was the economics of social protection.