Daniel Friedman joined the UCSC Economics faculty in 1985 after teaching at UCLA and UC Berkeley. He has broad research interests in applied economic theory, with emphasis on learning and evolution, laboratory experiments, and financial markets. The coauthor of five academic books, fourteen NSF grants, and roughly 100 research articles, he currently is studying a) financial market design, b) strategic behavior in real time, and c) evolutionary dynamics of continuous strategies or traits.

His popular book, Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Modern World, was published by Palgrave-MacMillan in October 2008. A second paperback edition, co-authored with journalist Daniel McNeill, appeared in June 2013 with the subtitle: A Dangerous Balance.