John Friedman

John Friedman

Hi, I'm John. I'd like to understand the world better. Previously, I was a PhD student in economics at UCLA & before that I was a researcher at MIT & Berkeley.

Currently working on datamule.

Fun Fact: My Erdős number is 4, and I've coauthored with a Nobel Prize winner.

Affiliations
  • UCLA
  • MIT
  • Berkeley
  • ODF23
  • Rapid Reviews: COVID 19
  • COVID-19 Policy Alliance
Selected Open Source
  • Developer of the datamule project
  • Developer of doc2dict
  • Developer of the Structured Output Organization
Selected Policy
  • Worked on the Puerto Rican Debt Crisis (Simon Johnson)
  • Wrote the English guidebook to the Korean CDC's Covid-19 Playbook (Simon Johnson)
  • Worked on Jump-Starting America (Simon Johnson)
  • Worked on the Massachusetts Covid-19 response (Simon Johnson)
  • Participated in the Covid-19 Policy Hackathon with a paper on using machine learning to optimize radio education
Selected Papers (RA)
  • Strengthening State Capacity (AER)
    • Used classical machine learning and regex to clean and link extremely messy civil servant name and job strings with US census data
    • Wrote custom PyQT Gui to aid in manually validating unclear matches
    • Wrote a geocoding package in R that used Wikipedia for better accuracy with historical names
  • Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations (Econometrica)
    • Scraped 5tb of federal contract data from 1997 to 2022
    • Flattened the xml structure into tabular using lxml with memory optimizations
  • The Costs of Employment Segregation (QJE)
    • Used fuzzy matching and regex techniques to link 700,000 messy job title strings extracted from federal records to the US Census
    • Results surpassed the Census Linking Project, the academic gold standard, in accuracy and percent linked
  • A Glimpse of Freedom: Political Resistance in East Germany (AEJ)
    • Made some complex graphics. Really fun to mess around with ggplot2
  • Bureaucratic Representation and State Responsiveness (Review of Economics & Statistics)
    • Used Google Cloud Vision to convert 100,000 British Blue Book scan tables into text format
    • Played around with Google's beta table OCR parsing tool
Selected Papers
  • Transitioning Out of the Coronavirus Lockdown: A Framework for Evaluating Zone-Based Social Distancing
Misc
  • Wrote a rshiny app "Bridge" that used the World Bank API to compare past living standards to the present