Stantcheva's research concerns
public finance and
political economy, mixing in elements of
macroeconomics. She studies the taxation of firms and individuals, as well as how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes towards economic issues and policies. Her recent work explores people’s attitudes towards taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, inflation, and social mobility using large-scale Social Economics Surveys and Experiments. She has also studied the long-lasting effects of tax policy – on innovation, education, and wealth. Stantcheva and co-authors link historical tax policy and
R&D policies to inventors’ behavior and firm R&D over the twentieth century, finding that higher personal and corporate tax rates reduce the quantity of inventive activity and shift its location, with limited effects on average quality. She has also researched how personal income and
corporate income taxation have shaped innovation over the 20th century ("Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century"), how top personal tax rates affect the international location choices of superstar inventors, and how student loans can be structured to improve access to education. She has analyzed dynamic
optimal taxation with human-capital formation, showing conditions under which
income-contingent education loans can be part of optimal policy over the life cycle. At 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 economic issues and policies. She particularly focuses on perceptions of
intergenerational mobility,
immigration, and
inequality and their link to support for
redistribution. Recent work has studied people's attitudes towards climate change, trade policy, inflation, and zero-sum thinking. She has also published a widely cited practical guide to designing surveys and embedded experiments for economics research. ==Media==