Raj Chetty wins John Bates Clark medal

Harvard’s Raj Chetty has just won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for young economists, presented by the American Economic Association.  The 33-year-old Chetty was one of FP‘s Top 100 global thinkers last year. Here’s an excerpt from the write-up: The Indian-American Chetty, who earned tenure at Harvard at the tender age of 29 and ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.
610984_130412_chetty2.jpg
610984_130412_chetty2.jpg

Harvard's Raj Chetty has just won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for young economists, presented by the American Economic Association.  The 33-year-old Chetty was one of FP's Top 100 global thinkers last year. Here's an excerpt from the write-up:

Harvard’s Raj Chetty has just won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal for young economists, presented by the American Economic Association.  The 33-year-old Chetty was one of FP‘s Top 100 global thinkers last year. Here’s an excerpt from the write-up:

The Indian-American Chetty, who earned tenure at Harvard at the tender age of 29 and is a winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant this year, has been bucking the conventional economic wisdom since he was an undergraduate, also at Harvard. As a sophomore, he caught the eye of legendary economist Martin Feldstein (No. 52) by proposing a counterintuitive reason that companies might increase investment under higher interest rates; Feldstein told Chetty to quit working for him and instead pursue his own research. Since then, Chetty — driven by the simple impulse for “math to guide the intuition, not for the intuition to guide the math,” as he has put it — has managed to overturn various age-old assumptions and ensure his place at the center of the U.S. policy debate over everything from unemployment benefits (they’re not necessarily a crutch — they give people time to find well-suited jobs) to tax breaks (one of their most important qualities, it turns out, is that beneficiaries actually know how they work). With an already hefty list of findings like these, Chetty is at the forefront of the growing field of behavioral public finance, using hard data to track how economic policy affects individual behavior and social welfare. It may sound simple, but, as Feldstein once put it, most economists today are “happy to take the data as they find it.” That’s just what makes Chetty’s novel, truth-testing experiments, in Feldstein’s words, “ingenious.”

Here’s Chetty’s paper on unemployment insurance and moral hazard. Here he is on tax subsidies and savings behavior. Here’s his study on how a child’s kindergarten classroom can affect her future earnings.

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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