Raj Chetty Indian-American economist Date of Birth: 04.08.1979 Country: USA

1. Raj Chetty: An Indian-American Economist
2. Early Life and Education
3. Academic Career
4. Awards and Recognitions

Raj Chetty: An Indian-American Economist

Raj Chetty is an Indian-American economist and a professor of economics at Harvard University. He was offered a permanent position at Harvard when he was just 28 years old, and he accepted it at the age of 29, becoming the youngest professor in the history of Harvard's economics department. His work has been published in prestigious journals, including the 'American Economic Review', 'Quarterly Journal of Economics', and 'Journal of Political Economy'.

Early Life and Education

Raj Chetty, whose full name is Nadarajan 'Raj' Chetty, was born on August 4, 1979, in New Delhi, India. He lived in New Delhi until the age of nine when his family immigrated to the United States in 1988. After graduating from the University School of Milwaukee, Chetty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard in 2000. He then obtained a PhD in economics from the same university in 2003. His dissertation focused on topics such as optimal unemployment insurance and risk preference coordination.

Academic Career

While still a sophomore, Chetty received advice from his mentor Martin Feldstein to start developing his own ideas after he expressed a paradoxical thought that high interest rates sometimes lead to increased investment. In 2003, at the age of 23, Chetty became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and by the age of 27, he was appointed as a tenured faculty member. In 2009, he returned to his alma mater, Harvard University, where he became a professor of economics and the head of the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at the age of 29. In 2008, the prestigious magazine 'The Economist' included Chetty in their list of the eight best young economists in the world. He has become one of the most cited economists worldwide.

Awards and Recognitions

In 2010, Chetty received the Young Labor Economist Award from the Institute for the Study of Labor for his work titled 'Moral Hazard Versus Liquidity and Optimal Unemployment Insurance,' which was published in the journal 'Journal of Political Economy'. In 2012, he was named one of the 23 recipients of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant. As a MacArthur Fellow, Chetty received a $500,000 grant. In 2013, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association for his significant contributions to economic knowledge and thinking as an economist under the age of forty.