Cousins less fortunate
At 39, Chetty has a boyish appearance and earnest demeanor that belie achievements including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (also known as a “genius grant”) and the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded each year by the American Economic Association to the economist under the age of 40 deemed to have made the biggest contribution to the field.
His interest in social mobility stems from his country of birth, India, where poor but ambitious families could afford to send only one child to college. His parents were the lucky ones: his father became a PhD economist and his mother, a doctor. Raj attended an elite private school. His cousins weren’t as fortunate.
“It was evident to me growing up how different our opportunities and experiences were, just by pure chance,” Chetty says.
Chetty’s family left India for the United States when he was 9, and he was struck by the stark contrast in the standard of living between the two countries. At 17, he was valedictorian of his graduating class at the University School of Milwaukee.
While initially drawn to the sciences—his two sisters are biomedical researchers—Chetty couldn’t imagine life in a laboratory, so he opted for economics. “I always liked math and statistics,” he says. “I wanted to do something that would have an impact on the world.”
He was admitted to Harvard College and—unusually for an undergraduate—worked as a research assistant to Martin Feldstein, also a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. Chetty graduated in just three years and earned his PhD in another three.
After a teaching stint at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Harvard where, at age 29, he became one of the youngest-ever tenured professors of economics. He moved to Stanford in 2015. He and his wife, Sundari, a stem-cell biologist, have a young daughter.
Friedman, a Harvard classmate and now a collaborator, remembers Chetty as “somebody who was focused on the big, important questions.”
But Chetty was frustrated by the sparsity of data available for empirical, as opposed to theoretical, work. Small sets of data, he felt, were overly amenable to varying interpretations, depending on assumptions and the methodology. “It all felt a little fragile,” he says.
“I had the sense that I wanted to do things graphically,” he continues. That way, “you’re not imposing the assumption that there is linear relationship or a quadratic relationship. You’re just saying, ‘Let’s plot the data and see what we get.’ ”
To do that, Chetty needed data—lots of it. Not thousands of observations, but millions. US government data sets that large weren’t available to his team, but he found them in Austria and Denmark and wrote a series of papers he felt were more conclusive than his previous work. Then, in 2009, the US Internal Revenue Service agreed to give them access to tax data stripped of information identifying individuals.