The Chetty research group, which is part of the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy (LEAP) at Harvard, focuses on understanding how to improve government policy to spark economic growth and reduce poverty. The group analyzes the effects of government policies using mathematical models of the economy and tests these models using large datasets on households and firms. Current questions include:

• What are the long-run effects of tax policies and government spending on
  economic efficiency and growth?
• Does increasing the transparency
  and salience of government anti-poverty programs enhance their
  benefits?
• How can the government alter social norms to achieve
  better economic outcomes?

These theoretical and empirical research projects rely heavily on the Odyssey research computing cluster, as the simulation of complex dynamic models and analysis of datasets that contain billions of observations both require considerable processing power.

Faculty:
Prof. N. Chetty