Roland G. Fryer Jr.

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 conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago with Nobel laureate 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.

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. 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, Fryer published a paper 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][15]. Fryer addressed some of these criticisms in an interview with the New York Times.[16]. Recent academic work, written in response to Fryer and others, has argued that the types of conclusions generated through administrative records on police stops are mathematically incapable of reaching the conclusions advocated by Fryer's work.[17][18].

In May 2018, The Harvard Crimson reported that Fryer was the subject of at least two Title IX complaints for sexual harassment.[19] Based on finding that Fryer "engaged in “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” against at least five employees over the course of a decade"[19], Harvard barred him from his research lab, the Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs) in March 2018.[19] Harvard suspended Fryer in 2019 for two years without pay in March 2019.[20] EdLabs was permanently closed by Harvard in September 2019 as a further sanction against Fryer.[21]

Fryer is married to Franziska Michor, a Harvard mathematician with a PhD in evolutionary biology. They met in 2006, as members of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He "courted her by betting a dinner date on whether he could find evidence that smoking reduces cancer; to her dismay, he sent her a report from the tobacco lobby." [22]

In 2008 The Economist listed Fryer as one of the top eight young economists in the world.[23] In 2011, Fryer was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a "Genius Grant".[24] 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."[25]

• 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. 119 (3): 767–805. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.364.1615. doi:10.1162/0033553041502180. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-03-05.
• Roland G. Fryer Jr. (2014). "Injecting Charter School Best Practices Into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 129 (3): 1355–1407. doi:10.1093/qje/qju011.
• Roland G. Fryer Jr. (2019). "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force". Journal of Political Economy. 127 (3): 1210–1261. doi:10.1086/701423.

• Roland Fryer's home page at Harvard University
• American Inequality Lab