RAJ CHETTY

 

Professor

Department of Economics 

University of California, Berkeley 
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880

E-mail: chetty @ econ.berkeley.edu
Phone: (510) 643-0708
Fax: (510) 643-0413

 

 

Curriculum Vitae

 

Summary of Research



Working Papers

 

The Effect of Adjustment Costs and Institutional Constraints on Labor Supply Elasticities: Evidence from Denmark (with John Friedman, Tore Olsen, Luigi Pistaferri, and Anders Frederiksen), June 2009. Slides

 

Bounds on Elasticities with Optimization Frictions: An Application to Taxation and Labor Supply, April 2009

 

Teaching the Tax Code: Earnings Responses to an Experiment with EITC Recipients (with Emmanuel Saez), March 2009

 

Optimal Taxation and Social Insurance with Endogenous Private Insurance (with Emmanuel Saez), revised October 2008

 

An Agency Theory of Dividend Taxation (with Emmanuel Saez), NBER wp 13538, October 2007

Do Consumption Commitments Affect Risk Preferences? Evidence from Portfolio Choice (with Adam Szeidl), November 2007

Consumption Commitments: Neoclassical Foundations for Habit Formation (with Adam Szeidl), October 2005

 

Published Papers

Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis: A Bridge Between Structural and Reduced-Form Methods, forthcoming Annual Review of Economics.  Slides

 

Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence (with Adam Looney and Kory Kroft), forthcoming American Economic Review.  Web Appendix.   Slides.

[Data and code here][Older version (NBER wp 13330) with bounded rationality model here]

 

Is the Taxable Income Elasticity Sufficient to Calculate Deadweight Loss? The Implications of Evasion and Avoidance, forthcoming American Economic Journal – Economic Policy

 

Moral Hazard vs. Liquidity and Optimal Unemployment Insurance, Journal of Political Economy 116(2): 173-234, 2008. Slides.  Erratum.

[Data, stata code, and unemployment benefit calculator here] [Search model simulation code here]

Cash-on-Hand and Competing Models of Intertemporal Behavior: New Evidence from the Labor Market (with David Card and Andrea Weber), Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(4): 1511-1560, 2007    Slides. [NBER wp with additional results here]

Interest Rates, Irreversibility, and Backward-Bending Investment, Review of Economic Studies 74(1): 67-91, 2007

Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences (with Adam Szeidl), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(2): 831-877, 2007

A New Method of Estimating Risk Aversion, American Economic Review 96(5): 1821-1834, December 2006

Dividend Taxes and Corporate Behavior: Evidence from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut (with Emmanuel Saez), Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(3): 791-833, 2005  Slides. 

[Stata code and hand-collected institutional and executive ownership data here] [NBER wp with additional results here] [results updated to 2006Q2 here]

 

A General Formula for the Optimal Level of Social Insurance, Journal of Public Economics 90: 1879-1901, 2006. Slides.

Consumption Smoothing and the Welfare Consequences of Social Insurance in Developing Economies (with Adam Looney), Journal of Public Economics 90: 2351-2356, 2006.  Slides.

The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job? (with David Card and Andrea Weber), American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 97:113-118, 2007  Slides. [NBER wp with additional results here]

The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut on Corporate Behavior: Interpreting the Evidence (with Emmanuel Saez), American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 96: 124-129, 2006

The Effects of Taxes on Market Responses to Dividend Announcements and Payments: What Can We Learn from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut? (with Joseph Rosenberg and Emmanuel Saez), in eds. A. Auerbach, J. Hines, and J. Slemrod, Taxing Corporate Income in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-33, 2007.

Income Risk and the Benefits of Social Insurance: Evidence from Indonesia and the United States (with Adam Looney), in eds. T. Ito and A. Rose, Fiscal Policy and Management in East Asia: NBER East Asia Seminar on Economics 16, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

 

Older Manuscripts:

Consumption Commitments, Unemployment Durations, and Local Risk Aversion, NBER wp 10211, December 2003

Optimal Unemployment Insurance When Income Effects are Large, NBER wp 10500, May 2004

Countercyclical Policies and Economic Stability, September 2001