Raj Chetty

Behavioral economist Raj Chetty studies education issues as they relate to social mobility and long-term student outcomes. His most famous educational work examined the long-term effects of teacher value-added on students. His research team found that high-value-added teachers produced long-term benefits for their students. Chetty’s capacity for designing innovative quasiexperiments and drawing on big data has positioned him as one of the foremost econometricians of his era, allowing him to push the field to grapple with questions of socioeconomic mobility in the United States. His work has been revelatory in an era of widening inequalities, concerns over intergenerational mobility, and a reckoning over racial gaps and discrimination. Chetty’s work on mobility created a highly-publicized mobility report card for colleges and universities rating them on their record on propelling students from the lowest to the highest income quintiles. His work has revolutionized education policy and economic research.