18 Facts About Raj Chetty

Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty was born on August 4,1979 and is an Indian-American economist who is the William A Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University.

Raj Chetty is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

Raj Chetty was born in New Delhi, India and lived there until the age of nine.

Raj Chetty's family immigrated to the United States in 1988.

Raj Chetty graduated from University School of Milwaukee in 1997 and earned his AB from Harvard University in 2000.

Raj Chetty continued at Harvard to earn his PhD in 2003, completing a dissertation under the direction of Martin Feldstein, Gary Chamberlain, and Lawrence F Katz with a thesis titled Consumption commitments, risk preferences, and optimal unemployment insurance.

In 2003, at the age of 24, Raj Chetty became an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming a tenured associate professor there at 28.

In 2009, Raj 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, Raj Chetty moved to Stanford, where he became a professor in the Economics Department.

In 2011 with John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff, Raj 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.

Raj Chetty is known for research showing that economic mobility varies enormously within the United States and for work on the optimal level of unemployment benefits.

Raj Chetty used information from deidentified federal income tax records, which gave him records from 1996 to 2012.

Raj Chetty concluded that 5 significant variables strongly correlated with intergenerational mobility.

In 2020, in collaboration with the US Census, Raj Chetty worked with Hendren and Friedman to construct the Opportunity Atlas, a comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children's outcomes in adulthood using data covering nearly the entire US population.

Raj Chetty is among the most cited young economists in the world.

Raj Chetty was awarded the Padma Shri, an award for distinguished service in any field, by the Government of India in 2015.

Research by Raj Chetty was covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Our World in Data, and Vox.

In 2023, Raj Chetty received an honorary Doctor of Sciences from North Carolina State University.