Stefanie Stantcheva

Stantcheva uses large-scale surveys and experiments to study how people perceive, understand, and respond to tax policy, finding that widespread misconceptions about tax systems significantly influence support for redistribution. Her work bridges public economics with behavioral and political economy approaches, moving beyond models that assume perfectly informed rational agents.

Stantcheva is a professor of economics at Harvard University, where she founded and directs the Social Economics Lab. She became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's economics department.

Yes, Stantcheva received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2023, awarded by the American Economic Association to an economist under forty who has made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. She also received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, which recognizes outstanding research by a woman early in her career.

Stantcheva has conducted large-scale survey experiments across multiple countries showing that people's beliefs about intergenerational mobility and the fairness of the economic system strongly shape their preferences for redistributive policies. Her findings reveal substantial cross-country variation in perceptions of mobility that often diverge from actual mobility data.