Raj Chetty

Overview

Economist at Stanford University (previously Harvard); one of the most cited empirical economists of his generation. Works on income inequality, economic mobility, and the causal effects of social programs using large administrative datasets. Best known for the Opportunity Insights project, which uses IRS and SSA data to study economic mobility and health inequality at the local area level.

Key Contributions / Features

• Optimal social insurance (Chetty 2005): Showed that UI-duration effects are driven primarily by non-distortionary income effects for borrowing-constrained households, not the substitution effects assumed by moral-hazard models; launched the sufficient-statistics approach to social insurance design. The framework was later applied to DI by Autor and Duggan (2007) and confirmed by Gelber, Moore, and Strand (2016). See Optimal Social Insurance.
• Intergenerational mobility geography (Chetty et al. 2014c): Lead author of the foundational geographic mobility study using 40 million tax records; documented enormous variation in absolute upward mobility across 741 commuting zones (Charlotte 35.8 to Salt Lake City 46.2), with fraction of single parents as the strongest correlate (r = −0.76); established rank-rank slope as the preferred mobility measure over IGE.
• Causal neighborhood effects (Chetty and Hendren 2018a/b): Used 7+ million U.S. movers and sibling age-variation design to establish that each additional year in a higher-opportunity neighborhood causally increases income rank by ~4%; full childhood (20 years) → ~80% pickup; no critical age; three placebo tests confirm causality; reconciles MTO experimental null via limited exposure at older ages. See Intergenerational Income Mobility.
• Income–life expectancy gradient (Chetty et al. 2016): Quantified the income–LE gradient for the U.S. using 1.4 billion tax and SSA death records, finding a 14.6-year LE gap between the top and bottom 1% of the income distribution for men; showed that local health behaviors — not healthcare access — drive geographic variation in low-income LE.
• Opportunity Insights: Founding director of the Harvard/Stanford research project; produced public-use datasets on life expectancy by income, race, and geography; extended to the Opportunity Atlas (2018) mapping mobility outcomes to census tracts.
• EITC information frictions experiment (Chetty and Saez 2009): Co-designed a field experiment randomizing EITC schedule information to 43,002 H&R Block clients in Chicago (2007 tax season). Found zero average treatment effect, but strong heterogeneity across 1,461 tax professionals: complying professionals increased clients' EITC amounts by $58 (p<0.01); non-complying professionals' clients shifted earnings into the phase-out (+$247, p<0.05). Identifies information frictions as the proximate explanation for the near-zero intensive-margin labor supply response to the EITC. See Earned Income Tax Credit.

Related

• Optimal Social Insurance
• Nathaniel Hendren
• Patrick Kline
• Emmanuel Saez
• David Cutler
• Intergenerational Income Mobility
• Income-Mortality Gradient
• Social Security Administration
• Period Mortality
• Earned Income Tax Credit
• Tax Salience
• Emmanuel Saez

Sources

• Chetty 2005 — Why Do Unemployment Benefits Raise Unemployment Durations The Role of Borrowing Constraints and Income Effects
• Chetty et al. 2014c — Where Is the Land of Opportunity The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
• Chetty and Hendren 2018 — The Effects of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility
• Chetty et al. 2016 — The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014
• Chetty and Saez 2009 — Teaching the Tax Code Earnings Responses to an Experiment with EITC Recipients
• Autor Figlio Karbownik Roth and Wasserman 2019 — Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes
• Bor Cohen and Galea 2017 — Population Health in an Era of Rising Income Inequality USA 1980–2015
• Friedman et al 2016 — Long-Run Drivers of Disability Insurance Rates
• Friedman et al 2018 — Explaining Geographic Differences in Young Disability Insurance Rates
• Rutledge 2018 — How Is the Mortality Gap Affecting Social Security Progressivity