A Chat With Raj Chetty, Clark Medalist

This afternoon, we caught up with Raj Chetty, the 33-year-old Harvard economist who is the latest winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious award for economists under the age of 40. Mr. Chetty is a public economist whose work has addressed topics including the returns from education, tax policies and savings behavior, often by parsing huge troves of data. This interview was lightly edited for clarity.

Q.

Tell me about how you choose your research topics, the research topics that won you this award.

A.

I think a lot of what I do is inspired by the real world â€" reading the newspaper, thinking about what people are talking about and experiencing. Those tend to be broad social and economic questions. How can we improve the education system? How can we reduce inequality of opportunity? They also tend to be budget issues, or questions about pension systems, retirement savings and so forth. I'm motivated by practical questions. And then I try to find a rigorous, data-based and mathematical way to approach those questions.

Q.

And that's tended to be through these really big data sets.

A.

In my view, the reason that the economics profession has had such a hard time answering these fundamental questions â€" like what type of tax system is the best, or how do you reduce unemployment â€" is that we in the social sciences can't run experiments like you can in the laboratory sciences. You really can't do it.

So my approach and the approach of other applied economists has been to seek these enormous data sets, whether they be from the private sector or the government or elsewhere. You can see the impact that these enormous data sets are having in the private sector. And my research is saying, you can use such data sets to answer public policy questions in fruitful ways too, because with those enormous data sets, you can run quasi-experiments within them.

Q.

What are you working on now?

A.

I'm broadly interested in the inequality of opportunity in the United States, and we hope to have a new paper out in a few months on that. And as you know, I'm interested in the role education might play in giving kids an opportunity to move up in the income distribution.