Raj Chetty

(Harvard University)

Raj Chetty was born in New Delhi, India in 1979 and obtained a BA in
economics from Harvard College in 2000 before obtaining a PhD in
economics from Harvard University in 2003. Between 2003 and 2008, he
taught economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he
received tenure at the age of 27. He then moved to Harvard University in
2009 as Professor of Economics and, at the age of 29, became one of the
youngest people to achieve tenure in the history of the Department of
Economics at Harvard.
Professor Chetty’s research focuses on theoretical and empirical issues
relating to taxation, unemployment, risk preferences, and social insurance.
His most-cited papers in chronological order include ‘Dividend Taxes and
Corporate Behavior: Evidence from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut’, Quarterly
Journal of Economics (2005), co-authored with Emmanuel Saez, ‘A New
Method of Estimating Risk Aversion’, American Economic Review (2006),
‘Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences’, Quarterly Journal of
Economics (2007), co-authored with Adam Szeidl, ‘Cash-on-Hand and
Competing Models of Intertemporal Behavior: New Evidence from the
Labor Market’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (2007), co-authored with
David Card and Andrea Weber, and ‘Salience and Taxation: Theory and

129
130 The art and practice of economics research

Evidence’, American Economic Review (2009), co-authored with Adam

Looney and Kory Kroft.
Professor Chetty received the American Young Economist award in 2008
and the CESIfo Distinguished Research Affiliate Award in the same year.
He is the Co-Director of the Public Economics Program at the National
Bureau of Economic Research and is Editor of the Journal of Public
Economics.
I interviewed Raj Chetty in his office in the Department of Economics at
Harvard University. It was mid-afternoon of Thursday, 23 September 2010.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Why did you decide to pursue an academic career in economics?

When I was in high school, I was very interested in science and thought that
I might become a bio-medical engineer, but then I realized that I didn’t like
working so much with my hands and preferred more conceptual work. My
Dad is an economist and so I knew a little about economics and its
potentially great importance for the world.1 I took a class on the subject as a
freshman at Harvard with a professor named Andrew Metrick, who is one of
the best teachers I’ve ever seen. I was really captivated by the material and
then, starting in my sophomore year as an undergraduate, I did the PhD
sequence in economics.
Why the academic career? From a young age, I was interested in doing
research because my parents and both of my sisters are researchers. I
wanted to answer questions that I thought would have a big impact on
people’s lives and that’s specifically why I’m interested in public eco-
nomics, which is very much about applying economic thinking and ideas to
policies to improve the world.

As a student, were there any other professors at Harvard apart from Andrew
Metrick who were particularly influential or inspirational?

Early on, Marty Feldstein played a huge role in my career. I started working
as a research assistant for him two months after I showed up at Harvard as a
17-year-old. And since then, I have continued working with Marty. He was
my undergraduate thesis advisor and one of my PhD thesis advisors.
 Raj Chetty 131

As a researcher, are there any colleagues apart from Martin Feldstein who
have been particularly influential or inspirational?

David Card at Berkeley is a phenomenal scholar. I try to emulate his work.

He truly views economics as a science more than anyone else in the
profession. His approach is very rigorous. He doesn’t come with any
ex-ante biases; he just states what the data says. I think that is very inspiring
and very influential.
And then, also at Berkeley, there is Emmanuel Saez, who just won the
Clark Medal. We are constant collaborators, and that makes a huge differ-
ence.
It’s important to have mentors at different stages. There are people like
Feldstein and Card who you look to as the kind of guys you want to be like
in the long run. And then there are people closer to your age like Emmanuel.

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON RESEARCH

What is the value of pure versus applied research in economics?

Both have a very important role. A lot of the applied research that people do
now is based on the pure research that was done, say, 10 or 20 years ago. For
example, the theories that were developed in game theory or mechanism
design – the pure theoretical fields of economics – have now permeated the
more applied fields of economics and are very important in policy discus-
sions today.

How would you describe the dialogue between theory and empirics in
economics?

I am very interested in that issue because public economics is really about

combining those two parts of the field. Often we start out with a model of
how some part of the economy works and then we ask what the optimal
policy is. But what I tell my students is that theory doesn’t tell you enough.
The traditional theory of taxes in its purest form, for instance, just tells you
that optimal tax rates are between 0 and 100 per cent. A policymaker wants
to hear something better than that! And so the modern evolution of the field
– and the focus of my research – has been about how we can make more
precise statements about policy, which has involved combining theory and
data.
132 The art and practice of economics research

Has your research agenda changed at all during your short career?

I have gotten more interested in behavioral economics over time. Your

thinking evolves as you see data and problems, and you consider what
features seem to be important. I’m more interested in the social aspects of
behavior. Often we focus on economic incentives and changes in prices as
being the key determinants of behavior, but my sense is that in many
contexts, it’s actually social incentives that matter quite a bit; you are
concerned about what other people think of you in addition to just the dollar
and cents aspects.
And then in terms of topics, one naturally shifts over time. Most recently,
I have started working on topics related to education, whereas in the past, I
was more focused on tax and social insurance welfare policies. All of those
things are policy-related, but in different domains.

Do you think it is important to have broad research interests?

I think it makes you a more creative economist if you can draw ideas from
many different fields, but there is value in expertise. My approach has been,
for two or three years, to focus on one set of topics and write a series of
papers that address some of the important issues, and then move on to
another area.
Tools are also very important, although you don’t want to be totally
tool-driven because that approach leads to research that is not as creative.

Do you think there is any difference in the types of work done by researchers
at different stages of their careers based on tenure concerns, publication
requirements or other pressures? Should there be a difference?

My sense is that people tend to do more abstract work earlier in their career
and more applied work later. And from a tenure perspective, people tend to
do riskier work after they have tenure, which I think is the great benefit of
having tenure. I am engaged in projects that could easily take a couple of
years to pan out. They are complicated experiments. I would say that, out
of five projects, one of them is surely not going to work. But you want to
give people tenure so they can produce the highest-risk, highest-reward
projects.
 Raj Chetty 133

IDEA GENERATION
Where do you get your research ideas?

I don’t get my best ideas by sitting at my desk, reading papers and thinking,
“What can do I better?” It’s more about being aware of what the literature
says and what the questions are, and then going out into the world and
thinking, “What is it about the real world that we are missing in standard
economic models?” For example, a standard assumption we make is that
everybody pays attention to all the incentives that we face; we always take
taxes into account and we always think about the implications of our
behavior for government policies. I was once in the grocery store and was
thinking about the fact that when you buy something here in the US, the
price that you pay at the check-out is more than that quoted on the shelf. The
implicit assumption in economics is that everybody is thinking about the
tax-inclusive price of that product when we are deciding whether or not to
buy it. But is that actually true? It seems plausible that people focus on the
price on the shelf. And the reason I thought that might be the case was that a
lot of the prices that are quoted are just below an integer, like $5.99 or $9.99.
The tax-inclusive prices are already above the integer and so intuitively it
makes you think that people are not focusing on the tax-inclusive prices,
which could have important implications for tax policy. And so that led to a
paper conducting an experiment of posting tax-inclusive price tags for a
thousand products in a grocery store and seeing whether that affects
demand patterns and then developing a theory of why it does and what that
means for tax policy.2

At what point does an idea become a project that you devote resources to?

After thinking about an idea, I’ll often look up what other people have done
on the topic, talk it over with some colleagues, and then do some prelimin-
ary work to see if I might have a strategy to tackle the problem in a
compelling way. And then if I feel it meets the bar for interest and I can do a
good job, I’ll devote time and resources to it.
134 The art and practice of economics research

IDEA EXECUTION
What makes a good theoretical paper?

A good theoretical paper in economics is one that casts light on a new

mechanism or intuition in a way that is elegant – it’s not overly complicated
– and rigorous – it’s general and doesn’t depend upon strong assumptions.

Can you give an example?

A canonical example of an incredibly influential theoretical paper would be

the one by George Akerlof on the market for ‘lemons’, demonstrating with
simple models how asymmetric information has dramatic implications for
many economic problems.3

What makes a good empirical paper?

A good empirical paper is one that meets the scientific bar for good
evidence. First, it’s not a paper that is highly sensitive to a lot of assump-
tions that were made in the empirical analysis. Second, it’s a paper that is
very transparent, where you can see that such and such policy or experiment
had a clear effect. And third, it’s a paper that tackles a fundamental question,
or provides evidence on a theory that is very influential. For example, is
adverse selection an important problem in practice? What can we do about
it? What policies have impacts in dealing with the problem of adverse
selection?

Can you give an example?

There are so many empirical papers that I think are really important. I would
say a lot of the work that David Card has done broadly on how various
policies such as minimum wage policies, Medicaid policies, and unemploy-
ment benefits affect behavior and welfare are all examples of well-executed
and high-quality empirical papers.4 I also think they will stand the test of
time. At some level with theory, conditional on your assumptions and the
correct math, there is no disputing whether your work will stand the test of
time or not. In empirics, something can often look like a good result, but
some factor wasn’t taken into account. And so a good empirical paper is one
where after 20 years of follow-up work, it is still considered to be right.
 Raj Chetty 135

When you hit a brick wall on a project, do you continue to work on the
problem or do you take a break and work on something else?

I like to focus on the problem and find a way around the brick wall. I don’t
give up. I think if you have too much of a tendency to switch to a different
project, it’s too easy to effectively give up. There is a lot of return to just
struggling with something. Your best papers are often not ones where you
can immediately see all the ways round the road blocks; you had to struggle
for a month to figure something out.

Can you give an example?

Yes, I have a set of papers showing that unemployment benefits have less of
an efficiency cost for the economy than prior theories had suggested.5 But I
struggled with trying to formulate a framework to make that point clear.
And it’s also related to some work that I have done on risk aversion. I had an
idea on how you could estimate risk aversion from income and substitution
elasticities. But there is a technical issue of how to deal with complementar-
ity in the utility function. It took several weeks to figure out how to address
that. Eventually I did, and I think that insight has played a role in a number
of my papers. In fact, if I had not solved that problem, those papers could
not have been published. That’s an example of not giving up.

Related to the previous question, when a project isn’t going to turn out as
hoped, do you scrap it or aim to send the work to a second-tier or field
journal?

At this stage, I would scrap it because the returns in the profession are
completely convex in the sense that the big hits have a huge payoff and ten
small hits don’t have nearly as big payoff as one big hit.
You can’t get too attached to your projects. It’s important not to give up,
but it’s also important to be able to judge at a certain point that a project is
going to hit too many obstacles, and you’re not going to invest more time in
it.
136 The art and practice of economics research

THE WRITING PROCESS

Which aspect of the writing process do you find most difficult?

Starting from the blank page. But once I have a plan in mind, I don’t find it
that hard. It’s just a matter of putting down your results in a clear way.

What steps have you taken during your career to improve the quality of your
writing?

Getting lots of comments from people, and going through numerous

versions of each paper.

Who proofreads your writing?

I always have a team of research assistants who proofread my papers very

carefully.

How do you split up the writing tasks among co-authors?

In most of the projects I’ve been involved with, I play the role of bringing
everything together and trying to give the paper a single tone and a single
vision. It’s hard to have three or four people each writing a different section,
because the paper will be disjointed.

COLLABORATION
When you work with co-authors, how do you decide whom to work with?

That’s a good question. I think a lot of it is chance; whom you end up being
around. But then there are certain people whom you just click with. I have
written a series of papers with Emmanuel Saez.6 We have a style that works
well together. We trust each other’s judgment a great deal. It’s very
important when you are working with a co-author that you don’t feel like
you need to replicate everything that he or she does. That’s very inefficient.
And so with Emmanuel and a number of my other co-authors, I feel very
confident in the work they’re doing and, likewise, I think they feel confident
in the work I’m doing. And it’s also about sharing a common perspective
about what problems are important and what approach to take.
 Raj Chetty 137

How do you prefer to interact with them (e-mail, phone, or face-to-face)?

Around 75–80 per cent of the time, it is four different people doing work in
four different places, and communicating by e-mail and phone.

How has your working relationship with Emmanuel Saez changed since you
moved from Berkeley to Harvard?

We talk on the phone every day and exchange multiple e-mails every day. I
think that collaboration started really well because we were in the same
place. And because we developed such a strong collaboration before I left
Berkeley, it’s been very easy to maintain it.

What are the main challenges associated with collaborative work and how
do you overcome them?

It’s always tricky to keep everybody motivated and involved. Inevitably,

somebody feels like they are left out of the loop and then they end up
contributing less. It’s hard when that arises. And so we try to lay out each
person’s responsibilities up front and try to stick to that.

RESEARCH ASSISTANCE AND FUNDING

How do you use undergraduate and graduate research assistants?

If I have derived a result in a special case and I think that theoretical result
holds more generally, but perhaps there are some technical complications,
then I might assign a graduate student a very specific problem to solve. Then
I’ll look over what they’ve done.
In empirical projects, a graduate student will often be involved in the data
set-up work. When we want to analyze the effect of, say, early childhood
education on long-term outcomes, they will construct a dataset that contains
information on both the kindergarten classroom and the adult outcomes,
and that work will take several months.
With undergraduate research assistants, I assign more narrow tasks like
doing literature reviews and proofreading.

How important is funding for getting your work done?

It’s important for hiring research assistants and getting data.

138 The art and practice of economics research

Do you have any advice for a young scholar on the funding process?

It’s important to apply for NSF grants early on. One of the tricks to getting
funded is you have to talk about the work you have done rather than the
work you plan to do. I think a lot of people make the mistake of doing it the
other way around.

SEMINAR PARTICIPATION AND NETWORKING

What are the benefits to attending a seminar that is closely related to your
work versus one that is not closely related?

The seminars that are closely related to your work are important because
you need to know what is going on in your field and what other people think
about it. The seminars that are further away are informative for potentially
new ideas. A lot of those ideas are at a subconscious level or at a broad
methodological level in terms of how someone tackled a problem. Maybe
you can approach your problem in a similar way. That’s how I learn from
seminars.

How important is professional networking to success in research?

It’s somewhat important, but what draws me to academia is that it is a

merit-driven profession. It’s true that once you have achieved a certain
status, it’s easier to get things published, you have more resources at your
disposal, and you have better students. But, at the end of the day, all of that
is earned by merit. And so, as a young faculty member, if I were to choose
between spending an extra day working on a paper versus an extra day spent
working on networking, I would spend the day working on the paper
because I think it has a higher return. And it will lead to the networking that
is important.

To what extent is the absence of departmental colleagues working in one’s

research area a major disadvantage?

It’s somewhat of a disadvantage, but it’s not insurmountable. We live in

such a connected environment these days. I’ll often talk to people at many
other universities about their papers. One just needs to reach out.
 Raj Chetty 139

COMMUNICATION OF RESEARCH
How do you find the right balance between communicating your research at
an early stage versus the close-to-finished stage?

I talk informally to colleagues at an early stage. If I give a presentation, it’s

pretty polished because I think every time you present, you are making a big
impression on people. And so I’m not one who likes to give unpolished
presentations at other places with the intention of getting feedback. I don’t
feel comfortable doing that.

What are the unique challenges to giving a seminar and how do you
overcome them?

Giving a seminar is a different set of skills to doing research. Making that

transition from, “Here’s how I came up with my results … ” to “Here’s the
best way to explain my results to someone else … ” is a tough one. I think a
lot of people tend to tell you their course of thinking and not restructure the
entire material in a way that is most conducive to conveying it to a different
audience. It’s all about overcoming that challenge.

PUBLICATION
How do you decide upon the appropriate journal to send your research to?

I aim to send my work to the top economics journals to try to reach

economists broadly.

How would you best describe your approach to dealing with a ‘revise and
resubmit’ request from a journal? How about an outright rejection?

I try to get onto ‘revise and resubmits’ immediately. I deal with every
comment that is raised very thoroughly, and I write a very detailed response.
I do what it takes to get a publication in a top journal rather than sacrifice
and go to a lower journal.
With a rejection, I would try another top journal if I still thought the paper
had a shot. I would only go to the lower journals if I had tried a couple of
times and it didn’t look like it was going to work out.
140 The art and practice of economics research

Do you think that the current structure of the publication process in

economics facilitates or impedes scientific understanding and knowledge
production?

There are some huge delays in the top journals. That’s problematic, but
most of the time, people get their information about the latest research from
working papers, not from published papers. That reduces the cost. And so I
see publications more as a trophy; it is a signal of the value and merit of the
paper and less about knowledge dissemination.

REFEREEING AND EDITING

As Editor of the Journal of Public Economics, do you have any advice for a
young scholar on being a good referee?

Referee reports should be targeted at the core substance of the paper. As an

editor, I often get referee reports where young people are eager to impress
and write five pages. That’s useful, but it’s really nice to see reports that hit
at the two key points. That skill of reading a complex 50-page paper and
being able to distill it into a couple of its core ideas is not only critical for
good refereeing, but also for writing good papers.

TIME MANAGEMENT
How do you divide up your working day, both in terms of quantity and
timing of different kinds of work?

I just set aside blocks of time to be able to work on papers.

How do you balance multiple research projects?

I am a sequential type of guy; I don’t jump back and forth between papers. I
will get a paper to the point where I have submitted it, or completed the
revisions, or sent it to a co-author, and then I will switch to the next paper. I
like to get really deep into one paper. It has to be the only thing on my mind.
The reason I do that is because the times when I have the best ideas on those
papers are not when I’m sitting at my desk executing the paper, but rather
when I’m taking a shower or exercising.
 Raj Chetty 141

How do you balance your personal and professional lives?

My wife is also an academic and we try to co-ordinate around each other’s

schedules. But I also like the academic lifestyle. I will often work, go home
and play tennis and then work again in the evening. I don’t have a sharp
boundary where I have to leave the office at 6 pm. That’s not how I work.

REFLECTIONS AND THE FUTURE OF ECONOMICS

What have been the most important findings and contributions in your
research fields during your career?

I feel that some of the papers that Emmanuel has written on optimal taxation
have been some of the most influential in public economics in the past ten
years.7 His research has tremendous relevance for lots of different types of
problems and is very practical. More broadly, a great deal of influential
work has been done in slightly different areas in labor economics and in
development economics; more method-oriented work like development of
regression discontinuity-type research designs, which are currently very
influential in empirical economics.

What are the biggest challenges facing your research fields?

I think behavioral economics poses one of the greatest challenges. You want
to design optimal public policy, but the whole premise behind our theories
to design policy is the assumption that people optimize perfectly. And we
don’t really know what to do when people don’t optimize perfectly. We
shouldn’t be paternalistic and say that the government knows better about
what’s good for us, because the government doesn’t know what we should
be maximizing. What do people want? How do we get at that? Those are
some core, almost philosophical questions. While they are not public
economics themselves, they bear so heavily on the conclusions one would
draw that it’s hard to avoid them.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your own research?

If I were to pick a strength, it would be in trying to connect theory with the

data in a transparent way. But that in itself leads to a weakness – the
theoretical models that I work with are not as rich and don’t account for as
142 The art and practice of economics research

many features of the world as you might like. But I feel like I sacrifice that
from a practical perspective to be able to say something in the data.

In the end, has the profession helped to shape and bring out your research
for the best?

I have benefited tremendously from the profession in terms of colleagues

here at Harvard, at Berkeley, and at many other universities. I really enjoy
being part of the profession. Although economists emphasize self-interest, I
think the group of economics researchers is extremely generous in terms of
time and in promoting other people’s work.

Do you have any professional regrets?

Sometimes I wish I had learned more about psychology when I was in

college. I was very oriented towards learning economics, mathematics, and
statistics, and ignoring other social sciences. But as I feel like I understand
the world better – and how much we don’t understand about the world – I
think there are insights from the other social sciences that could matter a lot.
I have thought about taking a graduate psychology class because there’s
something to be learned from just seeing the way psychologists – or
sociologists for that matter – might teach this material. I would like to do
that in the long run.
Another person who is a great role model for me is George Akerlof. What
always impressed me about George was that he would take a class every
year, even after aged 60. And when he retired from Berkeley, his plan was to
apply to law school even after he had won the Nobel Prize. I like that idea of
trying to constantly learn from different fields.

What are your professional ambitions?

My ambition is to have a big impact on economics research and also on

policy; to do research that is relevant for improving social welfare, but also
make a contribution to knowledge at a more pure level. We’ve talked earlier
about examples of people who are doing that, and it would be great to
follow the same path.
 Raj Chetty 143

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being tenured at such a

young age?

The advantages are that you have a great deal of resources and freedom to
spend your most energetic years working on big projects. The disadvantage
is that it comes with a tremendous amount of expectation. I feel like I owe it
to the people who have invested in me, and to people more generally, to
deliver. I’m very conscious of that. Yes, academia is about merit and so
people have more respect for you for having achieved at a young age
because they know how hard it is, but you are also a target in the sense that
they want to see whether you are doing well.
People often ask me, “What motivates you to work really hard even after
getting tenure?” Part of our goal as professors is to make a difference to the
world. And I think if I were to just take it easy and not do anything at this
point, it would not be fair because there has been a tremendous amount
invested in people like me and there is an obligation to return that to society.

How would you describe the state of economics today? Are you optimistic
about its future?

We’re at a very exciting point because economists are starting to incorporate

insights from many other fields. It’s like the evolution in some of the other
sciences that were very theoretical and then became much more empirical. I
think economics is going to become much more scientific and much more
relevant in many, many areas. There are a huge number of problems that
economists will tackle, which will improve the world in many important
ways. I really believe that.

NOTES
1. Raj Chetty’s father is V.K. Chetty, a health economist at Boston University and Boston
Medical Center. He is formerly a professor of economics at Columbia University and the
Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India.
2. Chetty, R., Looney, A. and K. Kroft (2009), ‘Salience and Taxation: Theory and
Evidence’, American Economic Review, Vol. 99, No. 4 (September), pp. 1145–77.
3. Akerlof, G.A. (1970), ‘The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
Mechanism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 3 (August), pp. 488–500.
4. See, for example, Card, D. and A.B. Krueger (1994), ‘Minimum Wages and Employ-
ment: A Case of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania’, American
Economic Review, Vol. 8, No. 4 (September), pp. 772–793; Card, D. and P.B. Levine
(2000), ‘Extended Benefits and the Duration of UI Spells: Evidence from the New Jersey
Extended Benefit Program’, Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 78. No. 1–2 (October),
144 The art and practice of economics research

pp. 107–138; Card, D. and L.D. Shore-Sheppard (2004), ‘Using Discontinuity Eligibility
Rules to Identify the Effects of the Federal Medicaid Expansions on Low-Income
Children’, Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 86, No. 3 (November), pp. 752–766.
5. Chetty, R. (2006), ‘A General Formula for the Optimal Level of Social Insurance’,
Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 90, No. 10–11 (November), pp. 1879–1901; Chetty, R.
and A. Looney (2006), ‘Consumption Smoothing and the Welfare Consequences of
Social Insurance in Developing Countries’, Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 90, No. 12
(December), pp. 2351–2356; Chetty, R. (2008), ‘Moral Hazard vs. Liquidity and Optimal
Unemployment Insurance’, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 116, No. 2 (April),
pp. 173–234; Chetty, R. and E. Saez (2010), ‘Optimal Taxation and Social Insurance with
Endogenous Private Insurance’, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 2,
No. 2 (May), pp. 85–114.
6. Chetty, R. and E. Saez (2005), ‘Dividend Taxes and Corporate Behavior: Evidence from
the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 120, No. 3 (August),
pp. 791–833; Chetty, R. and E. Saez (2006), ‘The Effects of the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut
on Corporate Behavior: Interpreting the Evidence’, American Economic Review, Papers
and Proceedings, Vol. 96, No. 2 (May), pp. 124–129; Chetty, R. and E. Saez (2010),
‘Dividend and Corporate Taxation in an Agency Model of the Firm’, American Economic
Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (August), pp. 1–31.
7. See, for example, Saez, E. (2001), ‘Using Elasticities to Derive Optimal Income Tax
Rates’, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January), pp. 205–229; Saez, E.
(2002), ‘The Desirability of Commodity Taxation under Non-linear Income Taxation and
Heterogeneous Tastes’, Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 83, No. 2 (February), pp. 217–
230; Saez, E. (2002), ‘Optimal Income Transfer Programs: Intensive Versus Extensive
Labor Supply Responses’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 117, No. 3 (August),
pp. 1039–1073; Saez, E. (2004), ‘Direct or Indirect Tax Instruments for Redistribution:
Short-run versus Long-run’, Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 88, Nos 3–4 (March),
pp. 503–518; Saez, E. (2004), ‘The Optimal Treatment of Tax Expenditures’, Journal of
Public Economics, Vol. 88, No. 12 (December), pp. 2567–2684.