description Raj Chetty Overview
Raj Chetty is an Indian-born American economist at Harvard University whose research focuses on public economics, inequality, taxation, education, and social mobility. He is known for combining large administrative datasets with empirical research designs to measure how childhood location, family circumstances, schools, and public policies relate to adult economic outcomes in the United States. His work is intended to provide researchers and policymakers with geographically detailed evidence about opportunity and intergenerational mobility.
insights Ranking position
Raj Chetty ranks #34 of 253 in the Economist ranking, behind Franco Modigliani, ahead of Douglass North.
help Raj Chetty FAQ
What is Raj Chetty's Opportunity Atlas?
The Opportunity Atlas maps adult outcomes for children who grew up in different US neighborhoods using anonymized census and tax data. It reports measures such as earnings, incarceration, and marriage outcomes by childhood location and parental income.
What did Chetty find about moving to a better neighborhood?
Research by Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz found that younger children who moved through the Moving to Opportunity experiment experienced better adult outcomes. The benefits were stronger when children spent more of their childhood in lower-poverty neighborhoods.
What does Raj Chetty's work say about the American Dream?
Chetty and his collaborators found that absolute income mobility has fallen substantially across US birth cohorts. Their research suggests that both slower, less broadly shared economic growth and greater inequality contributed to the decline.
What are economic connectedness and social capital in Chetty's research?
Economic connectedness measures friendships across socioeconomic lines, such as ties between lower-income and higher-income people. In research using large-scale Facebook data, Chetty and collaborators found it was strongly associated with upward income mobility.
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