Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty is an Americaneconomist and the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance. Offered tenure at the age of 28, Chetty became one of the youngest tenured faculty in the history of Harvard's economics department. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Currently, he is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Public Economics.
Education and early career
Chetty was born in New Delhi, India and lived there until the age of nine. His family immigrated to the United States in 1988. Chetty graduated from University School of Milwaukee in 1997 and earned his AB from Harvard University in 2000. He continued at Harvard to earn his PhD in 2003 with a thesis titled Consumption commitments, risk preferences, and optimal unemployment insurance. As a sophomore in college, Chetty was told by his mentor Martin Feldstein to pursue his own ideas after proposing a counterintuitive idea that higher interest rates sometimes lead to higher investment. In 2003, at the age of 23, Chetty became an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming a tenured associate professor there at 27. In 2009, Chetty returned to Harvard, where he was the Bloomberg Professor of Economics and the director of the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy. In 2015, Chetty moved to Stanford, where he became a professor in the Economics Department. In June 2018, Raj Chetty's frequent coauthor John Friedman announced that Chetty will be returning to Harvard.
Research
In recent work with John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff, Chetty found that test-score based value-added measures are not substantially biased by unobserved student characteristics and that the students of high value-added teachers have markedly better outcomes later in life. Drawing on these findings, Chetty testified in the landmark case Vergara v. California in support of the plaintiffs’ key points: that teacher quality has a direct impact on students’ achievements and that the current dismissal and seniority statutes have disparate impact on minority and low-income students. Chetty is also known for research showing that economic mobility varies enormously within the United States and for work on the optimal level of unemployment benefits.
