Raj Chetty
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591601 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raj Chetty |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raj |
| FAMILY NAME | Chetty |
| SIGNATURE | CHETTY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7868-4647 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Social capital II: Determinants of economic connectedness
Low levels of social interaction across class lines have generated widespread concern 1–4 and are associated with worse outcomes, such as lower rates of upward income mobility 4–7 . Here we analyse the determinants of cross-class interaction using data from Facebook, building on the analysis in our companion paper 7 . We show that about half of the social disconnection across socioeconomic lines—measured as the difference in the share of high-soc…
Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth
Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning
This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people’s lived exp…
The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution by Jeremy Glick
The Economic Impacts of Covid-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data
We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity in the U.S. at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report weekly statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, job postings, and employment rates disaggregated by county, sector, and income group. Using the publicly available data, we show how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economy by analyzing heterogeneity in its impacts acr…
Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States
We construct publicly available statistics on parents’ incomes and students’ earnings outcomes for each college in the United States using deidentified data from tax records. These statistics reveal that the degree of parental income segregation across colleges is very high, similar to that across neighborhoods. Differences in postcollege earnings between children from low- and high-income families are much smaller among students who attend the s…
Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation
We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) versus environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that children's chances of becoming inventors vary sharply with characteristics at birth, such as their race, gender, and parents' socioeconomic class. For example, child…
Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective
We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences i…
Can a Mulatta Be a Black Jacobin
This essay approaches the stage versions of Toussaint Louverture (1934) and The Black Jacobins (1967), first, to emphasize the role of C. L. R. James's collaborations in the creation of the plays, and second, to argue that the latter version of the play presents a radical feminism that emerges precisely from these collaborations. One of the play's most radical revisions is the centrality of the militant mulatta Marie-Jeanne, whose centrality chal…
The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population.For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender.These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which ch…
Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective
We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences in w…
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates
We estimate the causal effect of each county in the United States on children's incomes in adulthood. We first estimate a fixed effects model that is identified by analyzing families who move across counties with children of different ages. We then use these fixed effect estimates to (i) quantify how much places matter for intergenerational mobility, (ii) construct forecasts of the causal effect of growing up in each county that can be used to gu…
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects
We show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up shape their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage patterns by studying more than 7 million families who move across commuting zones and counties in the United States. Exploiting variation in the age of children when families move, we find that neighborhoods have significant childhood exposure effects: the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighbor…
Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children…
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
I was honored that Lee Alston asked me to be the convener for the Nevins Prize Competition this year. There were close to a dozen submissions spanning a
The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014
IMPORTANCE: The relationship between income and life expectancy is well established but remains poorly understood. OBJECTIVES: To measure the level, time trend, and geographic variability in the association between income and life expectancy and to identify factors related to small area variation. DESIGN AND SETTING: Income data for the US population were obtained from 1.4 billion deidentified tax records between 1999 and 2014. Mortality data wer…
The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative im…
Effects of Local Health Interventions on Inequality in Life Expectancy: New Publicly Available Data
The article examines the relationship between income and life expectancy in the U.S. Particular focus is given to data drawn from tax and Social Security records. Additional topics discussed include how the largest gap is between the richest one percent and the poorest one percent of Americans, the impact that immigrants, college graduation rates and local government expenditures had on the data, and how data from the study discussed is available…
Behavioral Economics and Public Policy: A Pragmatic Perspective
The debate about behavioral economics–the incorporation of insights from psychology into economics–is often framed as a question about the foundational assumptions of economic models. This paper presents a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for improving empirical predictions and policy decisions. I discuss three ways in which behavioral economics can contribute to public policy: by offering new policy to…
Identification and Inference With Many Invalid Instruments
We study estimation and inference in settings where the interest is in the effect of a potentially endogenous regressor on some outcome. To address the endogeneity, we exploit the presence of additional variables. Like conventional instrumental variables, these variables are correlated with the endogenous regressor. However, unlike conventional instrumental variables, they also have direct effects on the outcome, and thus are “invalid” instrument…
Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 perce…
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax recor…
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to h…
Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility
We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1986, we measure intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks. For more recent cohorts, we measur…
Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 perce…
Moral Hazard versus Liquidity and Optimal Unemployment Insurance
This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a “liquidity effect” rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search (“moral hazard”) by combining two empirical strategies. First, I find that increases…
What Policies Increase Prosocial Behavior? An Experiment with Referees at the Journal of Public Economics
We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six-week deadline to submit a referee report; a group with a four-week deadline; a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four-week deadline; and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would …
Can a Mulatta Be a Black Jacobin
This essay approaches the stage versions of Toussaint Louverture (1934) and The Black Jacobins (1967), first, to emphasize the role of C. L. R. James's collaborations in the creation of the plays, and second, to argue that the latter version of the play presents a radical feminism that emerges precisely from these collaborations. One of the play's most radical revisions is the centrality of the militant mulatta Marie-Jeanne, whose centrality chal…
The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial Overcoming: Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage
The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial OvercomingToussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage Raj G. Chetty (bio) Rare is the work on the Haitian Revolution that fails to invoke C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Published in 1938, The Black Jacobins not only deepens understanding of the intricacies of Atlantic slavery, plantation economies, and the Revolution, but also emphasizes the way t…
Moral Hazard versus Liquidity and Optimal Unemployment Insurance
This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a “liquidity effect” rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search (“moral hazard”) by combining two empirical strategies. First, I find that increases…
Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis: A Bridge Between Structural and Reduced-Form Methods
The debate between structural and reduced-form approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies—transparent and credible identification—with an important advantage of structural models—the ability to make predictions about counterfactual outcomes and welfare. This literature has developed formulas for the welf…
Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence
Using two strategies, we show that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient. First, using a field experiment in a grocery store, we find that posting tax-inclusive price tags reduces demand by 8 percent. Second, increases in taxes included in posted prices reduce alcohol consumption more than increases in taxes applied at the register. We develop a theoretical framework for applied welfare analysis that accommodates salience effects and…
The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked t…
How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence from Project Star
In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We th…
Adjustment Costs, Firm Responses, and Micro vs. Macro Labor Supply Elasticities: Evidence from Danish Tax Records
We show that the effects of taxes on labor supply are shaped by interactions between adjustment costs for workers and hours constraints set by firms. We develop a model in which firms post job offers characterized by an hours requirement and workers pay search costs to find jobs. We present evidence supporting three predictions of this model by analyzing bunching at kinks using Danish tax records. First, larger kinks generate larger taxable incom…
Handbook of Public Economics
Using Differences in Knowledge Across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the Eitc on Earnings
We estimate the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on labor supply using local variation in knowledge about the EITC schedule. We proxy for EITC knowledge in a Zip code with the fraction of individuals who manipulate reported self-employment income to maximize their EITC refund. This measure varies significantly across areas. We exploit changes in EITC eligibility at the birth of a child to estimate labor supply effects. Individuals in high-…
Teaching the Tax Code: Earnings Responses to an Experiment with Eitc Recipients
We conducted a randomized experiment with 43,000 EITC recipients at H&R Block. Tax preparers gave simple, personalized information about the EITC schedule to half of their clients. We find no significant effects of information provision on earnings in the subsequent year in the full sample. Further exploration uncovers evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on both self-employment income and wage earnings across the 1,461 tax preparers invol…
Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 perce…
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in VA using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental design based on changes in teaching staff. Using school district and tax recor…
Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood
Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores (value-added) a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more than one million children, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to h…
Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility
We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1986, we measure intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks. For more recent cohorts, we measur…
Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 perce…
“Prophet of a Coming New World”: Eric Walrond at the Crossroads of Pan-Caribbean, Pan-American, and Pan-African Literary Studies
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal includes scholarship on the work of visual artists, commentary on current issues in Caribbean studies and travelogues. Anthurium remains committed to bridging the digital divide by making peer reviewed, scholarly articles and creative writing available to teachers, students, scholars and persons interested in Caribbean literature and culture worldwide without fee based subscriptions. We would like to thank t…
What Policies Increase Prosocial Behavior? An Experiment with Referees at the Journal of Public Economics
We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six-week deadline to submit a referee report; a group with a four-week deadline; a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four-week deadline; and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would …
The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial Overcoming: Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage
The Tragicomedy of Anticolonial OvercomingToussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins on Stage Raj G. Chetty (bio) Rare is the work on the Haitian Revolution that fails to invoke C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Published in 1938, The Black Jacobins not only deepens understanding of the intricacies of Atlantic slavery, plantation economies, and the Revolution, but also emphasizes the way t…
Behavioral Economics and Public Policy: A Pragmatic Perspective
The debate about behavioral economics–the incorporation of insights from psychology into economics–is often framed as a question about the foundational assumptions of economic models. This paper presents a more pragmatic perspective on behavioral economics that focuses on its value for improving empirical predictions and policy decisions. I discuss three ways in which behavioral economics can contribute to public policy: by offering new policy to…
Identification and Inference With Many Invalid Instruments
We study estimation and inference in settings where the interest is in the effect of a potentially endogenous regressor on some outcome. To address the endogeneity, we exploit the presence of additional variables. Like conventional instrumental variables, these variables are correlated with the endogenous regressor. However, unlike conventional instrumental variables, they also have direct effects on the outcome, and thus are “invalid” instrument…
The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014
IMPORTANCE: The relationship between income and life expectancy is well established but remains poorly understood. OBJECTIVES: To measure the level, time trend, and geographic variability in the association between income and life expectancy and to identify factors related to small area variation. DESIGN AND SETTING: Income data for the US population were obtained from 1.4 billion deidentified tax records between 1999 and 2014. Mortality data wer…
The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high-poverty housing projects to lower-poverty neighborhoods. We analyze MTO's impacts on children's long-term outcomes using tax data. We find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood when young (before age 13) increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates. Moving as an adolescent has slightly negative im…
Effects of Local Health Interventions on Inequality in Life Expectancy: New Publicly Available Data
The article examines the relationship between income and life expectancy in the U.S. Particular focus is given to data drawn from tax and Social Security records. Additional topics discussed include how the largest gap is between the richest one percent and the poorest one percent of Americans, the impact that immigrants, college graduation rates and local government expenditures had on the data, and how data from the study discussed is available…
Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children…
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
I was honored that Lee Alston asked me to be the convener for the Nevins Prize Competition this year. There were close to a dozen submissions spanning a
The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population.For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender.These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which ch…
Economics (25 works) · Demographic economics (15 works) · Mathematics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Demography (10 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (10 works) · Earnings (9 works) · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies (9 works) · Political science (9 works)