It's not very often that a young economist comes along and introduces a whole new approach for doing economic research.

My guest today, Harvard economist Stephanie Stancheva, has managed to do exactly that.

I was so convinced that this would be useful

and that I would learn quite a lot from it,

that it just seemed like I have to do this.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

How influential has Stephanie's research been?

This spring, she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal,

given annually by the American Economic Association to the most notable economist under the age of 40.

I'm almost 20 years older than Stephanie, but our academic paths have followed a remarkably similar trajectory.

In addition to both winning the Clark Medal, we got our PhDs under the exact same advisor at

MIT, Jim Peturba. And directly after grad school, we were both in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

It's a fellowship that brings together promising young researchers from a wide

array of disciplines, and it's an extremely unusual path for an economist to take. Only about 20

economists have done it in my lifetime. When Stephanie started at the Society of Fellows, she was

working in one of the most difficult and revered areas of economics. It's what we call

the optimal tax literature. And she was very successful. But then she took a radical turn,

and it's here that I started our conversation with a question that I've always wanted to ask her.

You were an absolute superstar graduate student, and the path you were on was essentially the dream

of every economics grad student. You're on this anointed path to virtually guaranteed success in the profession,

and then you decide that instead you're going to focus your research around conducting surveys.

And there are a few things economists hate more than survey research. It is obviously career

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