James K Glassman, editor-in-chief of The American magazine, announced today that Raj Chetty, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the winner of the The American magazine’s 2008 Young Economist Award, a research grant of $100,000 provided by the Searle Freedom Trust. The American is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute.

To be eligible for the award, economists have to be featured in the magazine’s bimonthly column entitled “The Young Economist,” which profiles talented economists under the age of forty doing groundbreaking original research. In the year since the launch of The American in November 2006, up to September 2007, six economists have been profiled.

A jury of economists awarded Chetty the grant for his proposal to empirically “identify a set of policy changes that will make low-income support programs more effective per dollar spent.”

Chetty, who is twenty-eight, did his undergraduate and PhD work at Harvard, became an assistant professor of economics at Berkeley at age twenty-three and an associate professor at age twenty-seven.

Chetty has done extensive research on taxation, unemployment, risk preferences and social insurance. Among his notable published research includes “Dividend Taxes and Corporate Behavior: Evidence from the 2003 Dividend Tax Cut,” with Emmanuel Saez, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The study found not only that more companies paid out dividends after tax rates were lowered but also that they were likelier to pay dividends if top executives had substantial shareholdings in the firm.

He serves on the board of editors for the Journal of Economic Literature and is a coeditor for the Journal of Public Economics. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.