Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

Roland Gerhard Fryer, Jr. (born June 4, 1977 in Daytona Beach, Florida) is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He also maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. In January 2008, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow^[1]

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.^[2] 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,^[3] effectively leaving Fryer to fend for himself. Fryer became a "full fledged gangster by his teens".^[4]

Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his father at the age of 4. Attending Lewisville High School, he starred in football and basketball, earning him an athletic scholarship from the University of Texas at Arlington. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 after two and a half years while holding down a full-time job.^[5] Fryer completed his Ph.D. in economics from Penn State in 2002. He also conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago with economist Gary Becker. Over the past three years, 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. Recently, Fryer has begun work on the Opportunity NYC project, which will study how students in low-performing schools respond to financial incentives.^[6]

Fryer is currently working as the CEO of the Education Innovations Laboratory .^[7]

The Economist lists Fryer as one of the top 8 young economists in the world.^[8] In 2011, Fryer was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a "Genius Grant". ^[9]

Bibliography (part)

• Roland G. Fryer, Jr.; Steven D. Levitt (May 2004). "Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school". The Review of Economics and Statistics 86 (2). http://faculty.smu.edu/millimet/classes/eco7321/papers/fryer%20levitt.pdf. 
• Roland G. Fryer, Jr.; Steven D. Levitt (2004). "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names". Quarterly Journal of Economics. http://www.cramton.umd.edu/workshop/papers/fryer-levitt-distinctively-black-names.pdf. 

References

External links

• Roland Fryer's Home Page at Harvard University
• Fryer's curriculum vitae
• American Inequality Lab
• Article on Roland Fryer in The American magazine