Fabio Ghironi: I'll tell you who my friend Sanjay Chugh was

I met Fabio, if I remember correctly, through the mutual friendship with Ugo Panizza, who was my fellow student during my university years spent in Turin. I was immediately struck by Fabio's kindness, that of great people, the authentic ones. Professionally, he needs no introduction: anything I said about him would be banal.

I am grateful to him, because each of our exchanges of messages he gives me serenity and positive energy. And I'm grateful to him too because he possesses an increasingly rare quality: sensitivity. You will agree upon reading his portrait of Sanjay Chugh, the talented economist who left us prematurely at the end of 2022. 
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di Fabio Ghironi*

I met Sanjay in 2006. I was at the Board of Governors to give a seminar on a paper about distortions under monopolistic competition and how to address them. Sanjay asked many questions. I clearly had not done a good job answering them, because he stayed after the seminar for more discussion. He was so helpful, and so full of energy and enthusiasm. I loved it.

We met again in 2008, when he invited me to give a seminar at the University of Maryland. He mentioned then the idea of working together on a paper about optimal fiscal policy in the model I had presented at the Board. I was delighted to start this project with him. Sanjay thought about distortions and optimal policy in a way that was different from what I was used to, and I was looking forward to learning from him. 

The end of the 2000s was a time of transformation for the macro group at Boston College, where I was at the time. We were losing Matteo Iacoviello, a key piece of the group, and needed to replace him. Sanjay had mentioned several times in our conversations that he loved Boston, and I was able to arrange for him to join us on a visiting basis. He quickly proved to be an amazing teacher and advisor for our students, and an invaluable contributor to the intellectual life of the group. Eventually, he received the full-time offer he deserved, and he joined us as Assistant Professor in 2012.

By that time, we had spent countless hours together, working on our paper, but also talking about many other topics - economics, the functioning of our profession, our lives, sports, food. I loved our conversations.

Then disaster struck.

In the spring of 2012, it was found that Sanjay had a brain tumor. He had started losing the ability to coordinate his thoughts, and it became so evident that something was wrong that my BC colleagues contacted his brother, Ravi.
Ravi came to Boston and convinced Sanjay to go to the ER at Mass General. An MRI scan showed a tennis-ball-size tumor. It was so large that the pressure it put on the brain impaired Sanjay’s cognitive abilities. Urgent surgery followed, and tests that delivered a devastating diagnosis: a very aggressive cancer. Even in the best scenario of fully successful surgery and following therapy, there would be a fifty percent probability that the cancer would be back within five years.

I visited Sanjay at Mass General as often as I could in those days. Our conversations on food often centered on his love of spicy food, and how it would cause him to commit “crimes,” adding absurd amounts of spices to wonderful Italian dishes. He also loved one of those horrible concoctions you can get at Starbucks, raspberry mocha something, one of those Starbucks atrocities that should be prohibited by law. Well, during those days at Mass General, my key task was to bring him a Starbucks raspberry mocha something every time I visited. I was so happy to do it. I was so happy that he was alive and recovering. I was amazed by his determination to return to normal life and work as quickly as he could.

I left BC after the spring of 2013 to move to the University of Washington, Seattle. The hardest part of that decision was to move far away from friends I loved, Sanjay and coaches, players, and families in BC’s Men’s Ice Hockey program among them. I returned to Boston many times between the fall of 2013 and the start of the Covid19 pandemic to be with these friends. Until the summer of 2016, I stayed at Sanjay’s place every time. Every time, we spent hours talking about work and life. Every time, we would make sure to take a selfie together.



Sanjay moved to Ohio State in the summer of 2016. He invited me to give a seminar there in the spring of 2017. We took our selfie also on that occasion.

We saw each other online many times between 2017 and last year, many other conversations about work and life, but we never saw each other in person again. He was scheduled to give a seminar at the University of Washington and stay at my home for a week in the spring of 2020, but the pandemic derailed that.

We had not been in touch in several months when I received the message from Ravi telling me that cancer had returned, attacked a different part of Sanjay’s body, and he had died. I do not know if he thought he had beaten cancer for good. I thought he had, considering that he had been cancer-free for a decade. I am still struggling to accept that we lost him.

The last days have been an avalanche of memories of the time we had together and of how much he loved his family-his mother, Ravi, and Ravi’s wife and their son, Seya. Ravi told me that he and his wife also have another son now, Aadhi. Sanjay loved spending time with Seya. I like to think of him smiling, playing with Seya and Aadhi. He had done that with my children in Boston.

Sanjay was an outstanding economist and, more importantly, a wonderful person - a kind, caring person. I was very lucky to meet him and I feel awful for not having been close to him in the last months of his life, to tell him how much I loved him, to laugh about spices in Italian food and raspberry mocha concoctions.

I miss you so much, Sanjay. I hope there is only peace and happiness where you are now. You will live in my heart and in my memories, and in those of the many whose lives you touched.


*Fabio Ghironi is Research Associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Fellow in the International Macroeconomics and Finance Programme of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and Fellow of the Euro Area Business Cycle Network. He's also member of the Advisory Board of International Finance.