Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. (born June 4, 1977) is an American economist who is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2007, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.^[1]

Fryer is the recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal.

Early life and education

Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive father at the age of 4. Attending Lewisville High School, he starred in football and basketball, earning an athletic scholarship from the University of Texas at Arlington. However, he never actually played for the Texas–Arlington Mavericks; instead he decided to embrace academics, joining the Honors College, whose dean helped find him an academic scholarship.^[2] He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years while holding down a full-time job.^[3] Fryer completed his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. He also conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago with economist Gary Becker. Fryer has collaborated with several other academics, including Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of Freakonomics, Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, and Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard.

Upon completing a three-year fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows at the end of the 2005–2006 academic year, Fryer joined Harvard's economics department as an assistant professor. In 2005, Fryer was also selected as one of the first Fletcher Foundation Fellows.

Academic career

He maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. In 2007, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard.^[1] He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow^[4] and received the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal.^[5] Fryer is widely regarded to be one of black America and Harvard's rising stars, having published numerous economics-related papers in prominent academic journals over the past few years.^[6] The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing: Fryer's mother left when he was very young, and his father, who beat his son, was convicted of rape,^[7] effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".^[8]

Recently, Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity NYC project, which will study how students in low-performing schools respond to financial incentives.^[9] Fryer is currently working as the CEO of the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University.^[10]

In 2016, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper by Fryer concluding that although minorities (African Americans and Hispanics) are more likely to experience police use of force than whites, they were not more likely to be shot by police than whites.^[11] The study generated considerable controversy and criticism.^[12][13][14]

Awards and honors

In 2008 The Economist listed Fryer as one of the top eight young economists in the world.^[15] In 2011, Fryer was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a "Genius Grant".^[16] He is the recipient of the 2015 John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to "that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge."^[17]

Selected works

• Roland G. Fryer Jr.; Steven D. Levitt (May 2004). "Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school" (PDF). The Review of Economics and Statistics. 86 (2).
• Roland G. Fryer Jr.; Steven D. Levitt (2004). "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names" (PDF). Quarterly Journal of Economics. doi:10.1162/0033553041502180. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-03-05. ((cite journal)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
• Roland G. Fryer Jr. (2014). "Injecting Charter School Best Practices Into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments". Quarterly Journal of Economics. doi:10.1093/qje/qju011.