Stefanie Stantcheva’s approach seemed like career suicide. In fact, it won her the John Bates Clark Medal. She talks to fellow winner Steve Levitt about why she uses methods that most of the profession dismisses — and what she’s found that can’t be learned any other way.

SOURCES:
- Stefanie Stantcheva, professor of political economy at Harvard University.

RESOURCES:
- "Understanding Economic Behavior Using Open-ended Survey Data," by Ingar Haaland, Christopher Roth, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Johannes Wohlfart (Working Paper, 2025).
- "Fighting Climate Change: International Attitudes toward Climate Policies," by Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Adrien Fabre, Tobias Kruse, Bluebery Planterose, Ana Sanchez Chico, and Stefanie Stantcheva (American Economic Review, 2025).
- "Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides," by Stefanie Stantcheva (NBER Working Paper, 2024).
- "Why Do We Dislike Inflation?," by Stefanie Stantcheva (NBER Working Paper, 2024).
- "How to Run Surveys: A Guide to Creating Your Own Identifying Variation and Revealing the Invisible," by Stefanie Stantcheva (Annual Review of Economics, 2022).
- "Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions," by Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva (NBER Working Paper, 2022).
- "Understanding Tax Policy: How Do People Reason?," by Stefanie Stantcheva (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2021).
- "Immigration and Redistribution," by Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva (NBER Working Paper, 2018).

EXTRAS:
- VerbAI by Generation Lab.

165. The Economist Who (Gasp!) Asks People What They Think

People I (Mostly) Admire