Raj Chetty

Economist

Raj Chetty and his team at Harvard built an impressive data-tracking tool at the start of the pandemic. Tracktherecovery.org took masses of anonymised information to work out the impact the virus was having— and continues to have—on employment, business revenue and consumer spending in the US. They could even measure which sorts of people were spending their stimulus cheques from the federal government. The data, broken down by income group, industry and location, has been invaluable in informing the economic debate on Covid-19 and the price of lockdowns. Chetty has previously won the John Bates Clark medal for outstanding economists under 40. But this may be one of his most important pieces of work yet.