John N. Friedman

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

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

  2020 · 725 citations

  We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity in the U.S. 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 impacts across subgroups. High-income individuals reduced spe…

  PublisherDOI

• How Did COVID-19 and Stabilization Policies Affect Spending and Employment? A New Real-Time Economic Tracker Based on Private Sector Data

  2020 · 487 citations

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• Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States*

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2020 · 372 citations

  Abstract We construct publicly available statistics on parents’ incomes and students’ earnings outcomes for each college in the United States using deidentified data from tax records. These statistics reveal that the degree of parental income segregation across colleges is very high, similar to that across neighborhoods. Differences in postcollege earnings between children from low- and high-income families are much smaller among students who attend the same college than across colleges. College…

  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…

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth

  2022-01-01 · 32 citations

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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

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Rose McDermotth-44
• Mark Blythh-32
• Patrick Hellerh-28