Overview
Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth. Works on income inequality, taxation, and redistribution. Best known for long-run U.S. top income share estimates (with Thomas Piketty) that documented the dramatic concentration of income at the top since the 1970s and are now a standard reference in the inequality literature.
Key Contributions / Features
- Piketty-Saez top income shares: Co-constructed long-run U.S. top income share series from tax records going back to 1917; showed that the top 1% income share fell from ~19% in 1928 to ~8% in the late 1970s, then rose back to ~19% by 2007. This dataset is the standard reference for U.S. income concentration.
- Chetty et al. 2014c: Co-author of the geographic mobility paper; contributed expertise in tax-record data construction and top-income measurement (relevant to the finding that top 1% income share is nearly uncorrelated with upward mobility across CZs).
- Optimal tax theory: Contributed analytical frameworks for estimating revenue-maximizing top marginal tax rates and the elasticity of taxable income.
- EITC information frictions experiment (Chetty and Saez 2009): Co-designed and co-analyzed a field experiment randomizing EITC schedule information to 43,002 H&R Block clients in Chicago. Found no average treatment effect but strong heterogeneity: tax professionals who complied with the intervention shifted clients' earnings toward the EITC maximum (+58EITC,p<0.01),whilenon−complyingprofessionals′clientsshiftedintothephase−out(+247 earnings, p<0.05). Results link information frictions to the near-zero intensive-margin labor supply response to the EITC. See Earned Income Tax Credit.
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