About

Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the Director of Opportunity Insights, which uses big data to study the science of economic opportunity: how we can give children from all backgrounds better chances of succeeding?

Research topics

• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Finance
• Accounting
• Economic growth
• Demography
• Law
• Labour economics
• Business
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2025-10-30 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admission rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of postcollege success.

  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-07-01 · 104 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: 'The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data'

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-09-17 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The programs replicate tables and figures from "The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data", by Chetty, Friedman, and Stepner. Please see the README_reproduction file for additional details. Updates are available for download here: https://github.com/OpportunityInsights/EconomicTracker and https://tracktherecovery.org/

  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society's Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-28

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  </p>This dataset contains replication files for "Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood" by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, and Benjamin Scuderi. For more information, see <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/gendergaps/">https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/gendergaps/</a>. A summary of the related publication follows.</p> <hr/> <p>We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s.</p> <p>First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substantially across the parental income distribution. Notably, the traditional gender gap in employment rates is reversed for children growing up in poor families: boys in families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution are less likely to work than girls.</p> <p>Second, these gender gaps vary substantially across counties and commuting zones in which children grow up. The degree of variation in outcomes across places is largest for boys growing up in poor, single-parent families.</p> <p>Third, the spatial variation in gender gaps is highly correlated with proxies for neighborhood disadvantage. Low-income boys who grow up in high-poverty, high-minority areas work significantly less than girls. These areas also have higher rates of crime, suggesting that boys growing up in concentrated poverty substitute from formal employment to crime.</p> <p>Together, these findings demonstrate that gender gaps in adulthood have roots in childhood, perhaps because childhood disadvantage is especially harmful for boys.</p>

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Measuring the Impacts of Teachers: (I) Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates; (II) Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-28

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  </p>This dataset contains replication files for "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates" and "Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood" by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. For more information, see <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/teachersi/">https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/teachersi/</a> and <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/teachersii/">https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/teachersii/</a>. <p>A summary of each related publication follows.</p> <hr/> <p>I: 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 records for more than one million children, we find that VA models which control for a student’s prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers’ impacts on student achievement.</p> <p>II: 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 have children as teenagers. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by approximately $250,000 per classroom.</p>

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-28 · 2 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  </p>This dataset contains replication files for "Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States" by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez. For more information, see <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/land-of-opportunity/">https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/land-of-opportunity/</a>. A summary of the related publication follows.</p> <hr/> <p>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.</p> <p>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 percentile increase in a child’s income.</p> <p>Second, intergenerational mobility varies substantially across areas within the U.S. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose.</p> <p>Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (1) less residential segregation, (2) less income inequality, (3) better primary schools, (4) greater social capital, and (5) greater family stability. While our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.</p> <p><em>The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internal Revenue Service or the U.S. Treasury Department. This work is a component of a larger project examining the effects of tax expenditures on the budget deficit and economic activity. All results based on tax data in this paper are constructed using statistics originally reported in the SOI Working Paper “The Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures: Evidence from Spatial Variation across the U.S.,” approved under IRS contract TIRNO-12-P-00374 and presented at the National Tax Association meeting on November 22, 2013. </em></p>

  PublisherDOI

• Revisiting event study designs: robust and efficient estimation

  2022-04-29 · 695 citations

  reportOpen access

  We develop a framework for difference-in-differences designs with staggered treatment adoption and heterogeneous causal effects.We show that conventional regression-based estimators fail to provide unbiased estimates of relevant estimands absent strong restrictions on treatmenteffect homogeneity.We then derive the efficient estimator addressing this challenge, which takes an intuitive "imputation" form when treatment-effect heterogeneity is unrestricted.We characterize the asymptotic behavior of the estimator, propose tools for inference, and develop tests for identifying assumptions.Extensions include time-varying controls, triple-differences, and certain non-binary treatments.We show the practical relevance of these insights in a simulation study and an application.Studying the consumption response to tax rebates in the United States, we find that the notional marginal propensity to consume is between 8 and 11 percent in the first quarter -about half as large as benchmark estimates used to calibrate macroeconomic models -and predominantly occurs in the first month after the rebate.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

  The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann traces how, during the 1940s, a set of “little magazines” in Cuba, Martinique, and Barbados served a crucial role in the process by which the idea of a Caribbean or West Indian or Antillean region came to be. In doing so, she brilliantly underscores the critical necessity of attending to how “literary infrastructures” (Gonzalez Seligmann’s term) produce uneven access to literary reception and literary world-making because of colonial power that centers European and US American metropoles. Yet the thrust of her book is not to reproduce that colonial literary infrastructure by giving too much attention to the failings of the publishing industries in these metropolitan centers. Instead, the book turns to shorter- and longer-lived Caribbean literary magazines from linguistically diverse areas of the region to underscore the way such magazines represented (and continue to represent) a challenge to the systematic infrastructural divestment—perhaps more than divestment, perhaps extraction—that has undergirded relationships between imperial publishing centers and Caribbean literary communities. The paradox, of course, is that the literary magazines themselves are “fragile and limited as infrastructure”; however, as Gonzalez Seligmann puts it, “these forms of literary infrastructure have sustained the development of Caribbean literatures, just as they have carried many marginal and avant-garde literary movements throughout the world” (14).Gonzalez Seligmann’s title, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, economically and generatively traverses what her book sets out to do: (1) tackle the very concept of writing via the conceptualization of “location writing”; (2) outline the way the Caribbean-as-region experiences a becoming in the post-war 1940s; (3) foreground the role of literary magazines in the tentative forging of that regional becoming; and (4) underscore the unique reading temporality that magazines foster, and in a particular time of empire for the Caribbean, as the post-WWII founding of the IMF definitively cements the shift of imperial power from Europe to the US. Her introduction elaborates upon each of these terms—“Writing,” “Caribbean,” “Magazine,” “Time”—as it moves breathtakingly across Caribbean cultural and political theory, theories of nation formation and reading publics, and critical studies of magazines. Gonzalez Seligmann argues convincingly that one set of stakes in attending to these literary magazines is their long-lasting impact: “literary magazines produced during the 1940s assembled and advanced the debates that structure many of the Caribbean’s political, social, and aesthetic trajectories until the present” (2). This includes the way these magazines participated in the attempts to forge Pan-Caribbean or Pan-Antillean social, political, and artistic projects.In addition to situating her study in relation to Caribbean political and cultural formation, Gonzalez Seligmann positions it within conversations about studies of magazines, periodicals, and journals. Early in the introduction, she elaborates on why she landed on the term “literary magazine” to describe the artifacts she examines, distinguishing it from “cultural journal” and “little magazine” and the associated terms in Spanish (literary or cultural “revista”) and French (“petit revue”), the former too broad in scope as it covers an array of literary and nonliterary magazines, the latter more oriented toward a modernist literary/aesthetic project than the conceptualization of literary magazines Gonzalez Seligmann is after. She specifically cites Jill Lepore’s discussion of magazines as metaphorical weapons, seeing a direct link between this conceptualization and the work of the Caribbean literary magazines she studies across the 1940s, with particular attention to imperial political economy, or the way empire materially affected infrastructural capacities to publish literary work. The book traces the way those Caribbean magazines could and in many cases did function as weapons against this particular effect of empire. Or, as Gonzalez Seligmann memorably puts it, “Up against the imperial Goliath of the global book industry, these Caribbean literary magazines waged a guerrilla pursuit of geopolitical and literary dimensions for the terms of Caribbean representation” (7).This point raises one of the central archival stakes of the project. Gonzalez Seligmann asks, pointedly: “In a [Caribbean] context in which periodicals were the principal means of circulating ideas and creativity at home, why is the primary focus in literary scholarship and teaching on Caribbean books?” (16). As Gonzalez Seligmann notes, book publishing inside the Caribbean was infrastructurally prohibitive during the mid-century (and across most of the twentieth century, really) because of global imperial structures, which meant that Caribbean authors who published books had to seek out editorial houses in European and North American metropoles. What Gonzalez Seligmann intimates, then, is that when scholar-critics attend to Caribbean books that are mostly published outside of the Caribbean instead of those Caribbean magazines published and circulating within the region, they reproduce the imperial structure that relegates Caribbean writing to a marginal position in the world of letters. What is more, Gonzalez Seligmann powerfully invokes and then extends Eric Bulson’s argument about the crucial role of English-language modernist “little magazines” to think through the mid-century Caribbean literary magazines she examines: “In the context of the Caribbean, the case is comprehensive: no literary magazine, no Caribbean literature” (17).To be sure, this bold claim could be modified slightly to acknowledge the role that radio programming played in fomenting Caribbean literature as a corpus, particularly in the Anglophone Caribbean, a point that Gonzalez Seligmann notes in a later chapter about the BBC program Caribbean Voices, which began as Calling the West Indies in 1939 and evolved into arguably the most important medium for facilitating, disseminating, and coalescing English-language Caribbean writing. Perhaps the book’s one weakness is insufficient attention to the relation between the scribal/written word in these literary magazines and the region’s expressive culture/performance work, as comparable modes of cultural work that both challenge the hegemony of books published in imperial metropoles and offer an important if understudied arena of cultural creation, transmission, dissemination, and pleasure.In Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, Gonzalez Seligmann deploys a method of reading individual literary magazines in the same spirit with which she has outlined the major concepts she pursues: “writing,” the “Caribbean,” and “magazine.” Her “slow reading” method is one way in which “time” becomes central to her book’s project. Slow reading here functions as something of a compromise between close reading and distant reading, attentive to both the literariness of particular works published within the magazines and the way editorial practices were embedded in and often resistant to broader patterns of circulation in global print cultures. As distinct from an approach that moves from primarily analyzing editorials in literary periodicals to evaluating their influence or impact, “slow reading” in Gonzalez Seligmann’s work “is predicated on the asynchronous temporality of [Caribbean literary periodcals’] intervention,” precisely because, in her view, these Caribbean literary magazines themselves produce “slow reading practices” (22). In other words, Gonzalez Seligmann derives her reading and research method directly from the way the literary magazines themselves operate, reversing the imperial trend of importing methods from metropolitan centers of criticism to study literature from the Caribbean (and other regions in the Global South).Following the introduction, the book’s first three chapters take as their respective subjects literary magazines specific to individual Caribbean nations: Chapter 2 studies Tropiques in Martinique; chapter 3 compares two Cuban revistas, the well-known Orígenes alongside the less-known and understudied Gaceta del Caribe; and chapter 4 analyzes the Barbadian literary magazine Bim. Even as each of these chapters is sited in a specific island, Gonzalez Seligmann consistently teases out the way each literary magazine bears the imprint of broader Caribbean influences and, also, how each magazine extends diachronically and synchronically across the region.In the case of Tropiques, Gonzalez Seligmann argues that its founder-editors—Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Roussy Césaire, and René Ménil—created “an intertextual theory and practice of Antillean-located poetry as a method of literary and social liberation” (27). The chapter presents a powerful case for reading Tropiques, not exclusively in terms of its contribution to the négritude movement nor Eurocentrically as an offshoot of Bréton-inspired surrealism, but instead, mining the agricultural metaphor of the French term manque, as an attempt to “till the fallow space of Martinican cultural production” (28). The chapter is clear that the responsibility for the lack of Martinican cultural production (the operative meaning of manque) lies with French colonialism that produced an infrastructural deficit for the creation of a reading and writing public.When comparing Orígenes and Gaceta del Caribe—the latter published only in one year, 1944, the former publishing for over a decade—Gonzalez Seligmann highlights the way that Gaceta del Caribe represented a more radically Caribbeanist orientation that also foregrounded Black Cuban and Black Antillean writers and writing than that of the more remembered Orígenes, which oriented itself far more toward Spanish and US American literary currents and implicitly and at times explicitly away from Black Cubans. Gonzalez Seligmann reads comparatively across reviews in both magazines in addition to writing by leading Cuban writers like Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier, to emphasize “the stakes of Gaceta del Caribe’s implicit work to forward Black aesthetics as a strategy with both literary-critical and sociopolitical ramifications” (100).Finally, the chapter on the Barbadian literary magazine Bim traces its evolution from hyper local—exclusively focused on writers from Barbados—to regional in orientation by the end of the decade, just as the British colonial idea of a politically federated West Indies was taking off. This chapter presents the “local” of local writing most compellingly, as the writing analyzed in the chapters is explicitly about local people and local stories, increasingly represented as and for the new regional identity of West Indian.Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time’s final chapter moves outward, taking a distant reading approach as distinct from the slow reading practices of the chapters discussed earlier. Titled “Polycentric Maps of Literary Worldmaking,” the chapter richly articulates theories of the magazine and literature’s contribution to worldmaking via theories of mapping and mapmaking. Gonzalez Seligmann’s overarching claim is that “while Caribbean magazines have been unable to compete infrastructurally with metropolitan magazines produced in Europe and the United States, they participate in polycentric forms of literary worldmaking that reconfigured the world literary system,” or what she calls “the empire of literary value” (130). She is careful in this last chapter, as throughout the book, not to overstate literary magazines as inherently or universally resistant, pointing out that “the magazine has been as much disposed to reinforcing the power of imperial cultural centers as it has been to subverting or circumventing that power by literary actors positioned against the empire” (131). In other words, it isn’t the literary magazine as medium per se that is the crux of Gonzalez Seligmann’s important intervention: it is the contestation with empire that the writers and editors engaged with literary magazines as a medium that facilitated infrastructural but tenuous possibilities for forging a regional Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility; it is, as Gonzalez Seligmann succinctly puts it, “the work of the magazine” that matters (131).This last chapter brilliantly engages theoretical work on periodical cultures—from more canonical work in the field by Richard Ohmann and Margaret Beetham to more recent work by Eric Bulson and Chelsea Stieber—to connect literary mapmaking with the medium of the magazine. Gonzalez Seligmann brings home clearly the stakes of the project then and their continued relevance today: these literary magazines attempted nothing less than a “reorientation of the literary world . . . to symbolically steer home the center of the literary world from faraway imperial capitals of literary infrastructure” (149). If the fields we inhabit—literary and cultural studies, studies of periodicals, modernist studies—are committed to working against literary and other means of sustaining colonial conditions, then Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time demands our attention. It points to a set of Caribbean magazines whose editors and contributors attempted to reshape literary worlds in a 1940s conjuncture of shifting imperial relations, and in doing so gives us a sense of the possibilities for a decolonial remapping of literary worlds today.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: The Welfare Consequences of Social Insurance and Redistributive Taxation: Evidence and Policy Implications

  NSF · $431k · 2007–2014

• Behavioral Responses to Taxation

  NSF · $186k · 2005–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Emmanuel Saez

  251 shared

• John N. Friedman

  John Brown University

  221 shared

• Nicholas Turner

  182 shared

• Danny Yagan

  University of California, Berkeley

  161 shared

• Nathaniel Hendren

  Impact

  101 shared

• Patrick Kline

  58 shared

• Søren Leth‐Petersen

  University of Copenhagen

  23 shared

• Adam Looney

  University of Utah

  22 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2003

• B.A., Public Policy

  Stanford University

  1998

Awards & honors

• MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship
• John Bates Clark medal