Harvard Graduate Raj Chetty is the winner of The American Magazine 2008 Young Economist Award

Raj Chetty, who completed both his undergraduate work and PhD at Harvard (graduating in 2003) was the recipient of The American magazine’s 2008 Young Economist Award. The award is a $100,000 research grant provided by the Searle Freedom Trust.

To be eligible for the award, economists have to featured in the magazine’s bimonthly column entitled “The Young Economist,” which profiles talented economists under the age of forty doing groundbreaking original research. In the year since the launch of The American in November 2006, up to September 2007, only six such economists have been profiled. The article featuring Chetty, “The Experimenter,” can be found in the September/October 2007 issue.

A jury of Economists awarded Chetty the grant for his proposal to empirically “identify a set of policy changes that will make low-income price support programs more effective per dollar spent.”

Chetty has done extensive research on taxation, unemployment, risk preferences and social insurance. Among his notable published research includes “Dividend Taxes and Corporate Behavior: Evidence from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut,” with Emmanuel Saez, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The study found not only that more companies paid out dividends after tax rates were lowered, but also that they were likelier to pay dividends if top executives had substantial shareholdings in the firm.

Chetty, who is 28, became an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley at age twenty-three and an associate professor at age twenty-seven. He currently serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Economic Literature and is coeditor for the Journal of Public Economics. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

From The American.