Raj Chetty | Macro Paper Warehouse

Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility

This paper documents sharp divergent trends in intergenerational economic mobility by race and class in the United States across the 1978 to 1992 birth cohorts, and investigates the causal mechanisms driving those changes. The core empirical facts are two: between 1978 and 1992 birth cohorts, the earnings gap between white children from high-income versus low-income families grew by approximately 28–30% (the “white class gap”), while the earnings gap between white and Black children from low-income families shrank by approximately 27–30% (the “white-Black race gap”). These twin trends — growing class gaps and shrinking race gaps — appear consistently across earnings, employment rates, educational attainment, SAT/ACT scores, incarceration, marriage, and mortality, and they hold in nearly every region of the country.

Diversifying Society's Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

This paper studies why children from high-income families are more likely to attend Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago — 12 colleges total) and whether attending these colleges causally improves post-college outcomes. The authors construct a de-identified panel dataset linking federal income tax records, Department of Education college attendance data, College Board and ACT test scores, and application and admissions records from several Ivy-Plus and flagship public colleges covering approximately 2.4 million students across entering classes from 1998–2015.

The Surrogate Index: Combining Short-Term Proxies to Estimate Long-Term Treatment Effects More Rapidly and Precisely

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in program evaluation: primary outcomes of interest — such as lifetime earnings or long-term employment — are often observed only with lengthy delays, forcing researchers to rely on short-term outcomes when making timely policy decisions. The authors develop a formal framework for combining multiple short-term proxy outcomes (surrogates) into a single “surrogate index” that, under stated assumptions, identifies the average treatment effect on the long-run primary outcome.