Stefanie Stantcheva

Stefanie Stantcheva (born in 1986 Bulgaria ) is a Bulgarian-born French economist who has served as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University since 2021. She has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique since 2018. In 2018, she was described by The Economist as one of the best young economists of the decade.

Career
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. Stantcheva became interested in economics had after witnessing the economic turmoil Bulgaria during its political and economic transition in the 1990s. She attended the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye in Paris, and read economics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2007. 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. She received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014, where she was advised by James Poterba and Iván Werning.

From 2014 to 2016, Stantcheva was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She became an assistant professor at Harvard University in 2016, and an associate professor at Harvard the following year. 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. She was appointed a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique in 2018. She received the Prix du meilleure jeune économiste de France in 2019, and the Elaine Bennett Research Prize in 2020.

Stantcheva has been a research associate at the NBER since 2018, where she was a faculty research fellow from 2014 to 2018. She has been an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 2020. 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.

Social Economics Lab
At Harvard, Stantcheva founded the Social Economics Lab, which surveys several countries in order to understand how their people think, and their attitudes and actions towards new social and economic policy. This data is extremely important to understand "invisible" data, like behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Some notable surveys conducted involve perceived and actual numbers of immigrants and unemployment amongst them, shortcomings of the US tax system, and social mobility across US states. The lab’s most recent research focuses on how people reason with US tax policy, which mainly revolves around fairness, distribution, and government efficiency of taxes. Another critical point of research is how people from different countries react to policy changes that seem to impede on civil liberties during COVID-19.

Research
Stantcheva's research concerns public finance—in particular, the question of how tax and transfer systems can better raise revenues, reduce inequality, and foster the productivity of firms and individuals. She focuses on three aspects of optimal taxation: 1) the dynamic effects of taxation, 2) the corrective role of taxation in the presence of asymmetric information and other market failures, and 3) social preferences and perceptions to understand the determinants of tax policy, combining theoretical and empirical work.

In 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 policies, and their social attitudes. She particularly focuses on perceptions of intergenerational mobility, immigration, and inequality and their link to support for redistribution. 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.

Together with Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, she presented a model of optimal labor income taxation for top incomes, taking into account standard labor supply responses as well as tax avoidance and compensation bargaining. In another project together with Saez, she characterized the optimal taxation of capital income.

Stantcheva studied the interplay between taxation and innovation, examining the effects of personal and corporate income taxation on innovation and thinking about how to better design the tax system and R&D policies to foster innovation. In "Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century" she analyzes the impacts of individual and corporate income taxes on individual inventors, firms that do R&D, and on innovation at the state level in the U.S. throughout the 20th century. She also shows that top personal tax rates affect the international location choices of superstar inventors.

Media
Stantcheva has made numerous appearances in the media both as an author and a speaker. Stantcheva has written articles for French newspapers of record Le Monde and Le Figaro and, appeared in video essays by Vox, including in one titled "Where does Innovation come from?". Stantcheva has also given many lectures and talks, some of which are filmed.

Selected bibliography

 * 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.