Stefanie Stantcheva

Stefanie Stantcheva (born 1986 in Bulgaria^[1]) is a French economist who has served as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University since 2021.^[5] She has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique since 2018.^[5] In 2018, she was described by The Economist as one of the best young economists of the decade.^[6] In 2025, she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal.^[7]

Stantcheva was born in Bulgaria in 1986, and lived in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, before moving to France, where she grew up.^[8] Stantcheva became interested in economics had after witnessing the economic turmoil Bulgaria during its political and economic transition in the 1990s.^[1] She attended the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, and read economics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2007.^[5] She then received a Master of Science degree in economics from the École Polytechnique in 2008, and a second MS in economics from the Paris School of Economics and the ENSAE in 2009.^[5] She received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014, where she was advised by James Poterba and Iván Werning.^[8]

From 2014 to 2016, Stantcheva was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.^[5] She became an assistant professor at Harvard University in 2016, and an associate professor at Harvard the following year.^[5] She became a full professor of economics at Harvard in 2018, and was appointed the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard in 2021.^[5] She was appointed a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique in 2018.^[5] She received the Prix du meilleure jeune économiste de France in 2019, and the Elaine Bennett Research Prize in 2020.^[5] She is also the recipient of a Carnegie Fellowship in 2021 and a Guggenheim Award in 2022.

Stantcheva has been a research associate at the NBER since 2018, where she was a faculty research fellow from 2014 to 2018.^[5] She has been an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 2020.^[5] She was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021, and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that year.^[5][9][10]

At Harvard, Stantcheva founded and directs the Social Economics Lab. The mission of the Social Economics Lab is to understand how people think and reason about economic issues and policies. Stantcheva and her co-authors and students pursue this by designing and conducting large-scale online social economic surveys and experiments that shed light on people’s economic understanding and provide a way to hear different ways of thinking. The recent work of the Social Economics Lab explores people’s attitudes towards taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, inflation, and social mobility. These Social Economics Surveys are rigorous research tools that can shed light on what is invisible in order datasets: perceptions, beliefs, reasoning, attitudes, views, and detailed individual economic circumstances.

Stantcheva's research concerns public finance and political economy, mixing in elements of macroeconomics. She studies the taxation of firms and individuals, as well as how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes towards economic issues and policies. Her recent work explores people’s attitudes towards taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, inflation, and social mobility using large-scale Social Economics Surveys and Experiments.

She has also studied the long-lasting effects of tax policy – on innovation, education, and wealth. Some examples include how to better design the tax system and R&D policies to foster innovation,^[11] how personal income and corporate income taxation have shaped innovation over the 20th century ("Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century"^[12][13]), how top personal tax rates affect the international location choices of superstar inventors,^[14] and how student loans can be structured to improve access to education.

At the Social Economics Lab she founded, she developed the use of large-scale, cross-country Social Economic Surveys and Experiments to study how people form views about economic issues and policies. She particularly focuses on perceptions of intergenerational mobility,^[15] immigration,^[16] and inequality^[17] and their link to support for redistribution. Recent work has studied people's attitudes towards climate change, trade policy, inflation, and zero-sum thinking.

Stantcheva has made numerous appearances in the media both as an author and a speaker. Stantcheva has also given many lectures and talks, some of which are filmed.

• Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities. (with T. Piketty & E. Saez). American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 230–271, February 2014.
• How elastic are preferences for redistribution? Evidence from randomized survey experiments. (with I. Kuziemko, M. Norton, and E. Saez). American Economic Review. Vol. 105, No. 4, pp. 1478–1508, April 2015.
• Generalized social marginal welfare weights for optimal tax theory. (with E. Saez). American Economic Review 2016, Vol. 106, No.1, pp. 24–45. January 2016.
• Optimal Taxation and Human Capital Policies over the Life Cycle. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 125, No. 6, pp-1931-1990, 2017.
• Immigration and redistribution. (with A. Alesina & A. Miano) National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 24733, June 2018.
• Intergenerational mobility and preferences for redistribution. (with A. Alesina & E. Teso). American Economic Review. Vol. 108, No. 2, pp. 521–54, February 2018.

• Stefanie Stantcheva's homepage