Barbara M. Fraumeni is Faculty Emerita of the Unversity of Southern Maine, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. She also holds secondary positions as a Special-term Professor of the China Center for Human Capital and Labor Market Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics and is a Senior Fellow of Hunan University in Changsha, China.

At the University of Southern Maine before retiring from that university in 2015, as well as teaching, she held a variety of administrative posts. A past Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) of the American Economic Association (AEA), in 2006 she won the AEA/CSWEP Carolyn Shaw Bell award given annually to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession. Before coming to the Muskie School in 2005, she served as Chief Economist of the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Previously she was a professor of economics at Northeastern, taught part-time at Wellesley College and Tufts University, held a variety of research positions in the Boston area (Data Resources, Inc., Dale Jorgenson Associates, Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University) and was an Economics Program Director at the National Science Foundation.

She has a 1972 B.A. from Wellesley College and a 1980 Ph.D. from Boston College, both in economics. Her areas of expertise include measurement issues and national income accounting; her research interests include human and nonhuman capital, productivity, economic growth, market and nonmarket accounts, investment in education, R&D, and measurement of highway capital stock and the output of government.

Barbara M. Fraumeni joined IZA as a Research Fellow in February 2019.