Richard Musgrave Visiting Professorship 2015: Raj Chetty

The 2015 award winner is Professor Raj Chetty, William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He has been an active CESifo Research Network Member since Mai 2008, when he won that year’s Distinguished CESifo Affiliate award.The award winner is chosen through a formal selection process by the President and Vice Presidents of IIPF together with the President of the CESifo Group.

For such a young economist, Raj Chetty has accumulated an impressive number of distinctions. He was this year’s Richard T. Ely Lecturer at the American Economic Association, and was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the same association in 2013, at the age of 33, when he also won the Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics. The list of distinctions goes on. His research interests include the fields of taxation, social insurance, and public spending for education. While his work is founded on basic microeconomics, he modifies this framework to take into account behavioral and institutional considerations. He is a member of the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers and one of the editors of the Journal of Public Economics.

On 16 April 2015, as part of his visiting professorship, he delivered the seventh Richard Musgrave Lecture on the topic of "Behavioral Economics and Public Policy: A Pragmatic Perspective".