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.

Dean Friedman is a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights. His work is rooted in big-data analysis, with a focus on topics like inequality, poverty, education, and tax policy.

A pathbreaking scholar of inequality and social mobility, some of his earliest work focused on the long-term effects of education. One prominent paper showed that an excellent 6th-grade teacher can increase the lifetime earnings of a single class of students by nearly $1.5 million, a finding that was cited by President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Address. In 2020, Friedman and the Opportunity Insights team created the Economic Tracker, harnessing private-sector data to produce timely and localized statistics on economic activity. The tool helped guide federal, state, and local governments through the depths of the COVID-19 economic crisis.

Most recently, Friedman has focused on upward mobility in higher education, writing on how admissions policies could increase social mobility at the nation’s most selective private universities and assessing the value of standardized testing in admissions. His work has been published in leading journals and featured in major media outlets, including front-page coverage in The New York Times.

Friedman is also a co-editor of the American Economic Review, the flagship publication of the economics profession. He served on the Treasury Advisory Council on Racial Equity and is president‑elect of the Eastern Economic Association. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously served on the Rhode Island Council of Economic Advisors. Earlier in his tenure at Brown, he served as Chair of the Economics Department (2021–2024).

Before joining Brown’s faculty in 2015, Friedman served as an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (2009–2014) and as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the White House’s National Economic Council during the Obama administration (2013–2014). He earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.