Redistributing Opportunity (John Friedman)

John Friedman is a Professor of Economics and International and Political Affairs at Brown. Collaborating with scholars such as Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez, Friedman works to provide very granular information on very big issues. He is a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights, where researchers and policy analysts work together to analyze new data and create a platform for local stakeholders to make more informed decisions.

An economist by training, Friedman uses the information collected by the IRS to tell researchers and the public whether and why the engines of opportunity we rely on actually deliver results. At the NYU Law Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium, Friedman presented work that he and his coauthors conducted about colleges and universities. That research “construct[ed] publicly available statistics on parents’ incomes and students’ earnings outcomes for each college in the US using de-identified data from tax records…. reveal[ing] that the degree of parental income segregation across colleges is very high, similar to that across neighborhoods.” Their work also shows that some schools (such as the State University of New York at Stony Brook) succeed in helping students who grew up poor gain upward mobility.

Today’s student quote is from Ha-Joon Chang's, 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism.

Resources:

1. Professor Friedman’s bio.
2. Dan Shaviro’s blog post about Friedman’s visit to the NYU Law Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium.
3. The paper Friedman presented at the Colloquium, "Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States".
4. The EITC article discussed in the episode, "Using Differences in Knowledge Across Neighborhood to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings".
5. The Pencil Question article is Darien Shanske, "Revitalizing Local Political Economy through Modernizing the Property Tax", 68 Tax L. Rev. 143 (2014).
6. The student quote is taken from Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism