Raj Chetty Wins the John Bates Clark Medal

Evan McGlinn for The New York Times Raj Chetty in his Harvard office last fall.

Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University, has won the 2013 John Bates Clark Medal, a laurel considered by many economists to be second only to the Nobel Prize.

The medal is given by the American Economic Association for achievement by an economist under the age of 40. At 33, Mr. Chetty is one of the youngest winners of the prize. (Paul Samuelson, who went on to win a Nobel, received the award when he was 31 or 32.) Past recipients also include the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, Milton Friedman, and Robert Solow.

Mr. Chetty specializes in public economics, and has published widely cited and influential work â€" much of it featured in this newspaper â€" on taxes, education and savings.

He and his co-authors have used enormous data sets to calculate the value of a great kindergarten teacher ($320,000) and to show the long impact that great teachers have on their students.

Other papers have shown the inefficacy of tax breaks in increasing retirement savings and the power of automatic savings programs. And Mr. Chetty’s most cited study demonstrates that consumers respond more to changes in an item’s posted price than to changes in sales taxes.

Mr. Chetty’s work has been so influential partly because it tackles public policy topics with profound relevance to millions of regular people’s lives â€" including tax policy, teacher accountability and the retirement crisis. Those are some of the most hotly debated topics in Washington, as well.

“Raj Chetty is a remarkably productive economist whose contributions assimilate evidence using a variety of methodological perspectives to shed new light on important public policy questions,” the American Economic Association said. “He has established himself in a few short years as arguably the best applied microeconomist of his generation.”