Raj Chetty

Chetty, who focuses on economic mobility, is an economist on a breakout streak. His work on the “value-added” of teachers helped win him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2012, after President Obama cited his research in the State of the Union address. Last year, Chetty won the John Bates Clark Medal (known as the “baby Nobel”), given to the best economist under the age of 40. And he recently gave the same presentation to Obama’s chief economic adviser and to Republican Congressman Paul Ryan on the same day, a few hours apart. Chetty now oversees a staff of 10 researchers, a job he does not take lightly: “My biggest nightmare is always that someone is going to have made an error in the thousands of lines of code that are involved in these projects and that feeds into some public policy thing.”