Stanford has completed a considerable coup in convincing Caroline Hoxby, one of Harvard’s most highly regarded economists, to join the University this fall after 13 years of teaching in Cambridge.

A Loss for Harvard

National media outlets have cast Hoxby’s move as a decided victory for Stanford — and a big blow for Harvard — in the seemingly annual competition of elite economics departments swooping for each other’s star faculty.

Economics Dept. Chair Tim Bresnahan said he is enthusiastic about Hoxby’s imminent arrival and added that she will arrive on campus later this summer, before beginning to teach in the fall.

“There is an important movement among young economists toward applying rigorous and powerful economic methods and new data to important social problems,” he said. “Caroline Hoxby is a leader in that movement.”

Hoxby said that a major determinant of her move was that Stanford gave her husband Blair — whose Harvard tenure bid had reportedly failed — a tenure offer in the English department.

While her husband will teach English on The Farm, Hoxby will teach her hallmark Economics of Education class to Stanford undergraduates, as well as public finance to graduate students.

The incoming professor said she was “positively thrilled” to join Stanford and wants to “contribute to this campus,” but she left some parting shots for Harvard.

“Stanford and other universities have strong leaders and they’re moving forward,” she said. “It’s hard for Harvard to move ahead if they’re in constant crisis mode.”

Hoxby criticized former Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ 2005 statements that there were differences in the “intrinsic aptitude” between men and women in the sciences. After the embattled Summers resigned last June, Derek C. Bok took over the post temporarily before Drew G. Faust was permanently installed earlier this year.

Hoxby likened Bok to a “substitute teacher,” and cited Harvard’s “well-known leadership problems” as an indirect reason for her switch.

An Acclaimed but Controversial Past

While Hoxby arrives at Stanford with the stirring publicity of a star within economics circles, she brings a vita as highlighted by controversy as it is studded with brilliance.

Her landmark paper, “Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Tax Payers,” published in 2000, argued that children perform better in cities with more competing school districts and became one of the most heavily cited studies on the topic.

But in 2005, Hoxby made headlines when she became entangled in a controversial spat with Jesse Rothstein, a young professor at Princeton.

Rothstein challenged the methods used in Hoxby’s 2000 paper and claimed that the results would have been insignificant had she used correct models and data series. As an UC-Berkeley graduate student, Rothstein conducted research that differed with Hoxby’s findings, and he later published a 69-page National Bureau of Economic Research publication in an effort to debunk the Harvard professor.

According to a July 2005 Harvard Crimson article, Hoxby, who is black, claimed that Rothstein’s persistent scrutiny of her work was a result of the “ideological bias” of his Berkeley advisor, David Card, and said that “there is quite a lot of race and gender bias going on here.”

Rothstein, who is white, in turn accused Hoxby of “name-calling” and “ad-hominem” attacks.

In an interview with The Daily, Hoxby firmly denied ever making the controversial remarks, saying that the “inexperienced reporter at the time,” Javier Hernandez, had made a mistake.

“The reporter made that up or attributed someone else’s quote to me,” she said.

“That’s not my style,” Hoxby added. She also said that she disputed the quote with The Crimson in a letter to the editor and that the newspaper subsequently ran a correction.

Hernandez told The Daily, however, that while Hoxby’s letter was indeed printed, no correction ever ran. The reporter, who later became The Crimson’s managing editor, said that emails and interview notes substantiate his reporting.

“In an interview with The Crimson and a follow-up email message, Hoxby repeatedly stated that she believed the challenges to her research were motivated in part by race and gender bias,” Hernandez wrote in an email to The Daily. “The Crimson stands by a fair and honest story that accurately reported Hoxby’s views.”

In spite of the controversy that surrounds her, Hoxby nonetheless received considerable acclaim from both students and peers at Harvard. Her Economics of Education course was often over-subscribed, and she received nearly perfect marks on her teaching performance. She was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa Prize as well as one of only 24 “Harvard College” professorships for outstanding undergraduate instruction.