Stefanie Stantcheva

Stefanie Stantcheva is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University and the founder and director of the Social Economics Lab. Her research focuses on public economics: the taxation of firms and individuals, and how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes towards economic issues and policies. In 2025 she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes in economics, recognising her groundbreaking work on the effects of tax policy on innovation, her theoretical analysis of optimal taxation, and her pioneering use of large-scale surveys and experiments.

Through the Social Economics Lab, which she founded in 2018, she explores public attitudes towards taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, and social mobility, developing new methods to measure how people reason about economic policy. Her earlier work examined the long-lasting effects of tax policy on innovation, education, and wealth.

Born in Bulgaria, Stantcheva received her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows before joining the Harvard Department of Economics. She has been a member of the Conseil d'analyse économique since 2018 and serves as Co-Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Her honours also include the Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2020), a Carnegie Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.