Stefanie Stantcheva is professor of economics at Harvard and founder of the Social Economics Lab. She studies the taxation of firms and individuals, as well as how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes toward public policies. Her work has centered around the long-lasting effects of tax policy — on innovation, education, and wealth. Recently, she has studied how R&D policies can be improved to foster innovation, how income and corporate taxes have shaped innovation over the 20th century, and how student loans can be structured to improve access to education. She has also explored people’s attitudes toward taxation, health care, immigration policies, environmental policies, and social mobility using large-scale social economics surveys and experiments. Stantcheva is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2019 Best Young French Economist Prize, and the 2020 Elaine Bennett Research Prize in Economics.
Her project, “Economic Policies, Voter Understanding, and Political Support,” seeks to understand the extent to which economic policy views are shaped by differences in knowledge, gaps in understanding, partisanship and ideology, or fairness considerations. It also explores how we can improve citizens’ understanding of the core economic policies that shape their everyday lives by developing and experimentally testing educational materials grounded in economic research. It brings together content from economics and survey and experimental methods from political science, psychology, and sociology.
