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Harvard's Raj Chetty will receive the 2014 Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics
The Barcelona School of Economics, in cooperation with the Government of Andorra and the Credit Andorrà Foundation, is pleased to announce that the 2014 Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics, in the memory of Prof. Antoni Calvó-Armengol, has been awarded to Raj Chetty.
Raj Chetty is the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-director of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2000 and his PhD in Economics from Harvard in 2003. He took a position at the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where he stayed until 2009 before returning to Harvard. He has been the recipient of a number of honors, including a Sloan Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the John Bates Clark Medal, and he was recently elected Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has served on various editorial boards and is now the editor of the Journal of Public Economics.
Contributions to research on social mobility
Professor Chetty’s recent research on intergenerational mobility has garnered worldwide media attention. He examines the social mobility of children in low income families around the US. Professor Chetty and his co-authors find that the children’s outcomes depend on characteristics of where they live, with very large geographic variation. They found that income mobility was affected by the size of the local middle class and how well the poor are integrated with the middle class, with greater integration correlating with greater mobility. Mobility also correlates with family structure, local school quality, and levels of civic and community engagement.
In other intriguing research, Prof. Chetty has quantified the impact that the size of a child’s kindergarten classroom and the experience of the teacher can have on that child’s college attendance, earnings, and savings. More broadly, Prof. Chetty has made many important contributions to our understandings of the impact of taxation and unemployment insurance on occupation choice, intertemporal consumption, and savings behavior.
Professor Chetty discusses his research in this video made by the MacArthur Foundation when he was named Fellow in 2012:
Prize background
The Calvó-Armengol International Prize memorializes Antoni Calvó-Armengol, who passed away in the Fall of 2007 at 37 years of age. A native of Andorra, Toni was a professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the BSE who made outstanding contributions in social economics.
The Prize is awarded every two years to an economist or other social scientist who is not older than 40 years old, for his or her contributions to the understanding of social structure and its implications for economic interactions. This is the third edition of the prize, with the inaugural prize going to Esther Duflo (MIT) and the second to Roland Fryer (Harvard).
The prize, which includes a cash award of €30,000, recognizes exceptional achievement in research, and the awardee will be the scientific director of a fully-funded workshop for 20 to 25 young investigators from around the world. The third ceremony and workshop are planned for Spring 2014. The prize selection committee consisted of Prof. Salvador Barbera (UAB and BSE), Prof. Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford University, prize chair), and Prof. Joel Sobel (UC San Diego).
Prof. Raj Chetty (Harvard University) has been chosen to receive the 2013 Calvó-Armengol Prize for his work on social mobility.
Equality of Opportunity Project
Prize Promoters
