Free exchange | Economics

The John Bates Clark Medal goes to Roland Fryer

A young Harvard economist wins one of the profession's most prestigious awards

By C.R. | LONDON

ON APRIL 24th the American Economic Association (AEA) announced that it would award this year's John Bates Clark Medal to Roland Fryer (pictured) of Harvard University. The professional body for academic economists gives out the prize each year to the "American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge". This year's prize was given to Mr Fryer, a 37-year-old, for his innovative work on economics, education and racial inequality. As the AEA notes on its website:

His innovative and creative research contributions have deepened our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of U.S. racial inequality. He has made substantial progress in evaluating the policies that work and do not work to improve the educational outcomes and economic opportunities of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the difficulties of increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded. Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems.

He has mastered tools from many disciplines to tackle difficult research topics. Fryer has developed and implemented compelling randomized field experiments in large U.S. urban school districts to evaluate education interventions. He founded EdLabs (the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University) in 2008 to facilitate such efforts and continues as its director. He has incorporated insights from psychology to formulate a new model of discrimination based on categorization, and he has used detailed historical archival research to understand the origins and spread of the Ku Klux Klan.

The award does not come as a complete surprise. Mr Fryer's work is widely lauded; The Economist included him on our list of the eight brightest young economists back in 2008. (Four have gone on to win the Clark Medal.)

Mr Fryer's prize nonetheless stands out. Top academic economists tend to be white. They often hail from privileged backgrounds and build their reputation on inscrutable econometrics. Mr Fryer does not fit that mould. He is the first African-American to win the medal (after having in 2008 become the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard, at age 30). Mr Fryer's childhood was not an easy one. He grew up poor, and was abandoned by his mother and beaten by his father as a child. As a teenager he made extra money on the side by selling counterfeit handbags. Perhaps not coincidentally, his research agenda is heavily focused on investigations of real-world policy questions. Mr Fryer has used economic tools to study America's racial divide and to explore how it might be narrowed—economic questions that historically have been understudied. Economics, as a field, seems slow to appreciate the possibility that the introduction of new perspectives can mean that more interesting questions get asked, leading to better answers.

Dig deeper:
Emerging economists: International bright young things (December 2008)
Pay-for-performance for school students is no silver bullet (May 2010)
Urban economics: What's in a name? (October 2010)
Charter schools: Education labs (July 2013)

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