Emmanuel Saez

By Sara L. Austin, EdD

Emmanuel Saez is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Saez studied mathematics and economics at the École normale supérieure and earned a Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An expert in taxation and wealth distribution, Saez has published an impressive body of work relating to economic concerns of households in the United States. He has tracked household incomes for poor, middle class and rich citizens, and found that income inequality has continued to track upwards since the Great Depression. With colleague Raj Chetty, he has studied social mobility and found that depending on geography, the economic well-being of American citizens correlated to factors such as the quality of locally available education, social capital, segregation, income inequality, and family structure. With Peter Diamond, he published a provocative paper titled, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendation”, which recommended an increase to the marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans – from 42.5% to 73%.

He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009, for his work in the economy of taxation, and for attracting the attention of new economists, and perhaps inspiring them to investigate new lines of inquiry related to income distribution.

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