Raj Chetty, Ph.D ~ Harvard University, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics, Department of Economics and Director of Opportunity Insights  

Topic: “Social Connections and Children's Chances of Rising out of Poverty: New Insights from Big Data”

Abstract: Children’s chances of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century in America.  What are the determinants of upward income mobility and how might we increase mobility out of poverty going forward? Researchers have long theorized that social connections may play a central role in upward mobility, but a lack of large-scale data on social networks has limited our ability to understand whether and how social connections matter. This talk will discuss recent research that uses data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to measure three different types of social capital: (i) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low vs. high socioeconomic status (SES); (ii) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (iii) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These new data reveal that the fraction of high-SES friends among low-SES individuals— termed economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of economic mobility identified to date. Half of the social disconnection across class lines in America is explained by differences in exposure to high-SES people in groups such as schools and religious organizations, while the other half is explained by friending bias—the tendency for low-SES people to befriend high-SES people at lower rates even conditional on exposure. The talk will conclude by showing how the new estimates of social capital —  which are now publicly available for each ZIP code, high school, and college in the U.S. — can be used to design and target interventions to increase social capital and economic mobility.                                                           https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04996-4              https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04997-3

Chetty's research combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. His work on topics ranging from tax policy and unemployment insurance to education and affordable housing has been widely cited in academia, media outlets, and Congressional testimony. Chetty received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2003 and is one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, he was a professor at UC-Berkeley and Stanford University. Chetty has received numerous awards for his research, including a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and the John Bates Clark medal, given to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field.