About

John N. Friedman is the inaugural Vascellaro Family Dean of the Thomas J. Watson Jr. School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the Briger Family Distinguished Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs. His work is rooted in big-data analysis, with a focus on topics such as inequality, poverty, education, and tax policy. Friedman is a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights, and his research has made significant contributions to understanding social mobility and inequality. One of his notable early works demonstrated that an excellent 6th-grade teacher can increase the lifetime earnings of a class by nearly $1.5 million, a finding cited by President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Address. In 2020, he and the Opportunity Insights team created the Economic Tracker, utilizing private-sector data to produce timely, localized economic statistics that helped guide government responses during the COVID-19 crisis. His recent research focuses on upward mobility in higher education, examining how admissions policies can enhance social mobility at elite universities and assessing the role of standardized testing in admissions decisions. Friedman has been published in leading journals, featured in major media outlets, and serves as a co-editor of the American Economic Review. He has served on various advisory councils, including the Treasury Advisory Council on Racial Equity, and is the president-elect of the Eastern Economic Association. Prior to his current role, he served as Chair of the Economics Department at Brown and held positions at Harvard Kennedy School and the White House’s National Economic Council. Friedman earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Economics
• Political Science
• Business
• Demographic economics
• Economic growth
• Sociology
• Accounting
• Finance
• Law
• Psychology
• Public economics
• Labour economics
• Demography

Selected publications

• Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy Plus Colleges

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2025-05-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades. Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes four times better than high school GPA conditional on students' race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Standardized test scores also exhibit no calibration bias, as they do not underpredict college performance for students from less advantaged backgrounds. Collectively, these results suggest that standardized test scores provide important information to measure applicants' academic preparation that is not available elsewhere in the application file.

  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-10-30 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admission rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of postcollege success.

  PublisherDOI

• Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-03-01 · 12 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades.Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional on students' race, gender, and socioeconomic status.Standardized test scores also exhibit no calibration bias, as they do not underpredict college performance for students from less advantaged backgrounds.Collectively these results suggest that standardized test scores provide important information to measure applicants' academic preparation that is not available elsewhere in the application file.

  PublisherDOI

• The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

  American Economic Review · 2025-12-31 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate 60 percent of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas. (JEL G51, I32, I38, J12, R23)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-07-01 · 104 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society's Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: 'The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data'

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-09-17 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access

  The programs replicate tables and figures from "The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data", by Chetty, Friedman, and Stepner. Please see the README_reproduction file for additional details. Updates are available for download here: https://github.com/OpportunityInsights/EconomicTracker and https://tracktherecovery.org/

  PublisherDOI

• The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2023-10-04 · 328 citations

  articleOpen access

  We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity in the United States at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report weekly statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, job postings, and employment rates disaggregated by county, sector, and income group. Using the publicly available data, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economy by analyzing heterogeneity in its effects across subgroups. High-income individuals reduced spending sharply in March 2020, particularly in sectors that require in-person interaction. This reduction in spending greatly reduced the revenues of small businesses in affluent, dense areas. Those businesses laid off many of their employees, leading to widespread job losses, especially among low-wage workers in such areas. High-wage workers experienced a V-shaped recession that lasted a few weeks, whereas low-wage workers experienced much larger, more persistent job losses. Even though consumer spending and job postings had recovered fully by December 2021, employment rates in low-wage jobs remained depressed in areas that were initially hard hit, indicating that the temporary fall in labor demand led to a persistent reduction in labor supply. Building on this diagnostic analysis, we evaluate the effects of fiscal stimulus policies designed to stem the downward spiral in economic activity. Cash stimulus payments led to sharp increases in spending early in the pandemic, but much smaller responses later in the pandemic, especially for high-income households. Real-time estimates of marginal propensities to consume provided better forecasts of the impacts of subsequent rounds of stimulus payments than historical estimates. Overall, our findings suggest that fiscal policies can stem secondary declines in consumer spending and job losses, but cannot restore full employment when the initial shock to consumer spending arises from health concerns. More broadly, our analysis demonstrates how public statistics constructed from private sector data can support many research and real-time policy analyses, providing a new tool for empirical macroeconomics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• New Evidence on Tax and Transfer Policies from the Universe of U.S. Tax Records

  NSF · $285k · 2010–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Raj Chetty

  Harvard University Press

  221 shared

• Emmanuel Saez

  164 shared

• Danny Yagan

  University of California, Berkeley

  160 shared

• Nicholas Turner

  149 shared

• Søren Leth‐Petersen

  University of Copenhagen

  25 shared

• Raj Chetty

  22 shared

• Torben Heien Nielsen

  University of Copenhagen

  19 shared

• Edward L. Glaeser

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  19 shared