John Friedman

Not to be confused with John Friedmann.

John Friedman
Nationality	American
Spouse	Hilary Levey Friedman
Academic background
Alma mater	Harvard University
Academic advisors	Andrei Shleifer, Edward Glaeser, David Laibson, Alberto Alesina, David Cutler
Academic work
Institutions	Brown University Harvard Kennedy School
Website	Information at IDEAS / RePEc

John N. Friedman is an economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics, Chair of Economics, and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He additionally co-directs Opportunity Insights and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Starting on July 1, 2025, Friedman will be the inaugural dean of the Thomas J. Watson Jr. School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Friedman earned an A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Career

His research interests include public economics and political economy. Friedman was previously an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and served as a Special Assistant to President Obama for Economic Policy on the White House's National Economic Council in 2013–2014. He became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Public Economics in 2019.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Friedman co-led a group that developed an economic tracker, the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker. This presented private-sector data on economic trends more frequently and more rapidly than officially published economic statistics.

Personal life

Friedman is married to Hilary Levey Friedman, a visiting assistant professor of education at Brown. The couple met in the fall of 2002 while they were completing fellowships at the University of Cambridge. They have two sons.

Selected works

• Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Danny Yagan. "How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project STAR." The Quarterly journal of economics 126, no. 4 (2011): 1593–1660.
• Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. "Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood." American economic review 104, no. 9 (2014): 2633–79.
• Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. "Measuring the impacts of teachers I: Evaluating bias in teacher value-added estimates." American Economic Review 104, no. 9 (2014): 2593–2632.
• Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, Tore Olsen, and Luigi Pistaferri. "Adjustment costs, firm responses, and micro vs. macro labor supply elasticities: Evidence from Danish tax records." The quarterly journal of economics 126, no. 2 (2011): 749–804.
• Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, Søren Leth-Petersen, Torben Heien Nielsen, and Tore Olsen. "Active vs. passive decisions and crowd-out in retirement savings accounts: Evidence from Denmark." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1141–1219.