About

Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is a Research Associate at the NBER and serves as Faculty co-Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. His research includes topics such as team incentives, economic growth driven by data, and firm dynamics, with recent publications exploring the effects of incentives on lower ability workers, the role of data in economic growth, and the impact of innovation and financial constraints on manufacturing firms in China. His work emphasizes the importance of understanding labor markets, technological progress, and firm behavior in shaping economic outcomes.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Labour economics
• Demographic economics
• Internal medicine
• Economics
• Oncology
• Geography
• Gastroenterology
• Ecology
• Engineering
• Biology
• Psychology
• General surgery
• Intensive care medicine
• Business
• Surgery

Selected publications

• Treatment of Resectable Gallbladder Cancer

  Cancers · 2022 · 32 citations

  • Medicine
  • General surgery
  • Internal medicine

  Gallbladder cancer (GBC) is the most common biliary tract cancer worldwide and its incidence has significant geographic variation. A unique combination of predisposing factors includes genetic predisposition, geographic distribution, female gender, chronic inflammation, and congenital developmental abnormalities. Today, incidental GBC is the most common presentation of resectable gallbladder cancer, and surgery (minimally invasive or open) remains the only curative treatment available. Encouragingly, there is an important emerging role for systemic treatment for patients who have R1 resection or present with stage III-IV. In this article, we describe the pathogenesis, surgical and systemic treatment, and prognosis.

  DOI

• How Much Do Immigration and Trade Affect Labor Market Outcomes?

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2021 · 32 citations

  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • Demographic economics

  IMMIGRATION AND TRADE—particularly with less developed countries (LDCs)—have become more significant to the U.S. economy since the 1960s than they were earlier in the postwar period. The number of immigrants relative to native-born workers has risen; an increasing proportion of immigrants come from less developed countries; and a disproportionate number of immigrants have relatively little schooling. The ratio of exports and imports to GOP has risen as well, and an increasing proportion of imports have come from less developed countries. Immigration and trade have thus increased the effective labor supply of less skilled workers in the United States, with potential consequences for relative wages and employment…

  PublisherDOI

• From Child-Pugh to MELD score and beyond: Taking a walk down memory lane

  Annals of Hepatology · 2021 · 112 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Gastroenterology

  The Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CTP) and the MELD (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) scores were designed to predict the outcome of decompressive therapy for portal hypertension. They were prospectively validated to predict mortality risk in patients with a wide spectrum of liver disease etiology and severity. Unlike the CTP score, the MELD score was derived from prospectively gathered data. Its calculation was based on serum bilirubin, serum creatinine, international normalized ratio (INR) and etiology of liver disease. Instituting a continuous disease severity score that de-emphasizes waiting time resulted in better categorization of waiting patients and enhanced transparency. The US instituted the MELD system in 2002 and soon thereafter, MELD-based liver allocation was adopted throughout the world including Latin America. The most significant impact of MELD-based policies has been the reduction of waiting-list mortality. In the years after implementation of the MELD system, several options have been proposed to improve the MELD score's accuracy. Adding serum sodium (MELD-Na) increased the accuracy of the score in predicting waiting list mortality, thus completing the original MELD score as a prognostic model in liver allocation. On the 20th anniversary of the creation of MELD score we present a brief account of its development, its use to stratify patients on the waiting list for liver transplantation as well as its adoption as liver allocation system .

  DOI

• Within-Occupation Changes Dominate Changes in What Workers Do: A Shift-Share Decomposition, 2005–2015

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2020 · 33 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Demographic economics
  • Labour economics
  • Economics

  This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 2015 and decomposes those changes into components representing shifts within occupations and changes in occupational employment shares. Per our title, within-occupation changes dominate, raising doubts about the ability of projections based on expected changes in the occupational composition of employment to capture the likely future of work. Indeed, our data show only weak relationships between automatability, repetitiveness, and other job attributes and changes in occupational employment. The results suggest that analysts give greater attention to within-occupation impacts of technology in assessing the future of work.

  DOI

Recent grants

• FW-HTF-P: Impact of AI Robotics on Labor (AIRL)

  NSF · $150k · 2019–2020

Frequent coauthors

• David R. Snydman

  Tufts Medical Center

  110 shared

• Richard Rohrer

  Saarland University

  97 shared

• Robin Ruthazer

  78 shared

• Barbara G. Werner

  DAK-Gesundheit (Germany)

  76 shared

• R. Fairchild

  Cleveland Clinic

  73 shared

• Eben I. Feinstein

  University of Southern California

  65 shared

• Christopher R. Blagg

  65 shared

• John P. Capelli

  Stevens Institute of Technology

  65 shared

Labs

• Richard B. Freeman LabPI

Education

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1970

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1974

Awards & honors

• Mincer Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Society of Labor…
• IZA Prize in Labor Economics (2007)
• Frances Perkins Fellow of the American Academy of Political…
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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