Overview
Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Works on labor economics, regional economics, and econometric methods, with particular focus on wage inequality, employer wage-setting, and the causal estimation of place-based policies. Co-author of the foundational geographic intergenerational mobility paper.
Key Contributions / Features
- Chetty et al. 2014c: Co-author of the geographic mobility study documenting variation in rank-rank slopes and absolute upward mobility across U.S. commuting zones using 40 million tax records.
- Employer wage inequality: Co-led research showing large, persistent wage differences across employers — employer fixed effects explain ~20% of the variance in worker wages — reshaping understanding of labor market competition.
- Place-based policy evaluation: Work on enterprise zones, regional development programs, and the empirical identification challenges in evaluating local economic policies.
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