Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is a Research Associate at the NBER, and is currently serving as Faculty co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School, and is Co-Director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
Professor Freeman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). He is currently serving on the AAAS Initiative for Science and Technology. He has served or is serving on 12 Panels and Boards of the U.S. National Academy of Science, including The NAS Panel to Evaluate the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics Approach to Measuring the Science and Engineering Workforce, The Board of Higher Education and Workforce (BHEW), The Committee on Understanding the Engineering Education-Workforce Continuum (NAE), The Committee on Assuring a Future U.S.-based Nuclear Chemistry Expertise, The Committee on National Statistics Panel on Developing Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators for the Future, The Committee on Capitalizing on the Diversity of the Science and Engineering Workforce in Industry, The Committee on National Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists, The Committee on Demographic and Economic Impacts of Immigration, and the joint NAS, NAE and IM study on Policy Implications of International Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars in the U.S. United States.
Freeman received the Mincer Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Society of Labor Economics in 2006. In 2007 he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics. In 2011 he was appointed Frances Perkins Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2016 he received the Global Equity Organization (GEO) Judges Award, honoring exceptional contribution towards the promotion of of global employee share ownership. Also in 2016, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association; the award citation describes Richard as “an enormously innovative labor economist who has made pioneering contributions to virtually every aspect of the field.”
Professor Freeman’s research interests include the job market for scientists and engineers; the transformation of scientific ideas into innovations, Chinese and Korean labor markets; the effects of AI and robots on the job market; and forms of labor market representation and employee ownership.