Richard B. Freeman

CV - 24 Mar 2025
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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 Center for Labor and a Just Economy at the Harvard Law School.

Office Hours:
In Person - Office Hours: by appointment (contact e-mail below)
- Tues Morn - 10:45am-1:15pm (last appt 12:45pm)
- Tues Aft - 3pm-4pm (last appt 3:30pm)
- Thurs Morn - 10:45am-1:15pm (last appt 12:45pm)
Zoom office Hours: by appointment (contact e-mail below)
- Zoom appointment times are more flexible
To book an appt, Write to:
E-mail: freeman@nber.org + cc: amadeoholl@gmail.com
NOTE:
send your cell phone #, in case the elevators at NBER are locked and Prof. Freeman needs to meet you in the lobby

Office Address:
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
freeman@nber.org | rbfreeman@gmail.com
Tel: 617-588-0305
- but please use e-mail until further notice

Staff Support:
Jennifer Amadeo-Holl
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Mass Ave, 3rd Floor
amadeoholl@gmail.com

See NBER home page for projects and working groups
See Harvard's DASH for articles posted to Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.

Recent Publications

2025

Freeman RB, Pan X, Yang X, Ye M. Team Incentives and Lower Ability Workers: A Real-Effort Experiment. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 2025.

Revision 1_TeamIncentives...

Despite a large literature on team incentives, studies on teams in a purely financial sense are limited. In such environments, team members independently engage in tasks with identifiable individual contributions, while their compensation is partially linked to team outputs. We conducted an experiment of such scenario with three distribution schemes (equal sharing, individual piece rate, and winner-takes-all) and examined these schemes both with and without a team threshold. Our results showed the surprising power of equal sharing on improving team productivity compared to winner-takes-all and individual piece-rate, contradicting the predictions of the standard economics theory. Our findings reveal that the higher team output observed under equal sharing was driven by the increased productivity of less able workers. This could be attributed to an explanation of guilt aversion and cannot be illuminated by several alternative theories. We also found that participants preferred piece rate over the other schemes. Yet, the presence of a team threshold highlighted the importance of cooperation, leading to a greater preference for equal sharing. Our findings suggest that organizations with workers of varying abilities are likely to benefit from an appropriate equal sharing component tailored to their responsiveness to sharing in rewards.

Revision 1_TeamIncentives...

2023

Freeman RB, Yang B, Zhang B. "Data Deepening and Nonbalanced Economic Growth,"75 (March 2023): . Journal of Macroeconomics. 2023;75(March). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2023.103503

Publisher's Version

As a newly emerging factor, data can promote economic growth by driving technological progress, and nonbalanced growth between digital industries and nondigital industries has been notable in recent years. This paper provides a novel growth model with two sectors that differ in the degree of data deepening and the factor structure of the production function. In the model, data in one sector is the by-product of economic activities not only in its sector, but also in the other sector. More importantly, data utilization within and across sectors can spur new ideas and promote technological innovation. The model indicates that increases in the stock of data in the two sectors have opposite effects on the allocation of skilled labor between the two sectors. The skill premium (the wage of skilled labor relative to the wage of unskilled labor) decreases with an increase in the fraction of skilled labor employed in the data-extensive sector. With credible parameter values, model calibration shows that faster growth of output occurs in the more data-intensive sector and the high skill premium persists in the long run.

Publisher's Version

2019

Zhang D, Du W, Zhuge L, Tong Z, Freeman RB. Do Financial Constraints Curb Firm’s Efforts to Control Pollution? Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms.. Journal of Cleaner Production. 2019;215:1052–1058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019年01月11日2

Publisher's Version

Financial constraints have long existed in China's manufacturing sectors. The growth of the
manufacturing sector has been slowing in recent years due to increasingly strict environmental regulations that force factories to cut production. In this study, we discussed whether financial constraints were essential in firms' decision to control pollution, and matched the Annual Surveys of Industrial Firms dataset with the Ministry of Environmental Protection survey data on firms' expenditures in industrial waste gas emission control. The relationship between calculated investment-cash flow sensitivity (ICFS) and the environmental investment ratio (the ratio of firms' expenditures on pollution control to total
assets) was analyzed. We found that, overall, financial constraints had a significantly negative effect on firms' efforts to reduce waste gas emission. State-owned enterprises (SOE) relieved financial pressure mainly by seeking external financing sources to reduce emission. On the other hand, private-owned (POE) and foreign-owned enterprises (FOE), if efficiently financed internally, can reduce waste gas emission by increasing investment in waste gas treatment. This study provided a quantitative analysis on firms' financial constraints in environmental protection investment, contributing to the development of
effective government policies on related issues in China.

Publisher's Version

2020

Zhang D, Zhuge L, Freeman RB. "Firm Dynamics of Hi-Tech Start-ups: Does Innovation Matter?" Dongyang Zhang, Liqun Zhuge, Richard B. Freeman. China Economic Review 59 (Feb 2020): 1-17.. China Economics Review. 2020;59(February):1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2019.101370

Innovation plays a vital role in corporate issues since it brings potentially appreciable profits and shores up their statuses in certain fields, although it may also harness firms, especially smaller ones, with high survival risks. This concern brings forth our research topic: will participating in innovation activities diminish small firms' risk of exit from the market? Our paper concentrates on hi-tech start-ups and complements existing firm dynamic studies by adopting a comprehensive annual survey dataset from a considerable science park located in Beijing. Using an efficient discrete-time proportional hazards model, and thanks to extensive data available, we can take a deeper investigation into this topic. Our research complies with most of the previous studies that show that the benefit from innovativeness outweighs the cost and we solidify our conclusions by considering a few distinctive features existing in China's economy.

Zhang D, Zhuge L, Freeman RB. Firm Dynamics of Hi-Tech Start-Ups: Does Innovation Matter? . China Economic Review. 2020;59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2019.101370