“I know it is a policy, rather than an economics conference, because there is a line for the women’s toilet,” she tweeted last November.

It also helps that they don’t fit the stereotypes of tweedy academics. Mr. Wolfers, who is Australian, looks like a nerdy surfer and tends to pull his chin-length blond hair into a ponytail. Ms. Stevenson has an irresistible laugh and a stylish taste in clothes and shoes.

Their professional stature extends beyond their study of domestic life. Until last September, Ms. Stevenson was the chief economist at the Labor Department, and has written influential papers on the effect of Title IX, which guarantees women equal access to academic and athletic programs, on women’s education and on future job success. Mr. Wolfers has been a co-author of papers on subjects as diverse as capital punishment and racial bias among N.B.A. referees. They are now writing an introductory economics textbook.

BUT it is their work on lovenomics, as it might be called, and their popularity with the news media, that have brought them attention outside the academy. Their modest celebrity has led to some sniping among their peers — several would not publicly declare their criticism — but their fans are effusive.

“They’re terrific economists,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economics professor who taught the couple during graduate school, adding that he saw no evidence that their public profile had “affected the quality of their scientific work.” (Professor Mankiw is a contributor to the Economic View column in Sunday Business.)

Economics has clearly been good to them. Their home in Philadelphia, in a historic building that once housed an African-American publishing house, features soaring ceilings and custom iron work. A glass-top Noguchi coffee table is in the living room, next to a white Jonathan Adler casting couch covered in a sheepskin throw from Costco. In the attic is a home gym with a treadmill, a boxing bag, a recumbent bicycle and a flat-screen television.

Matilda’s nanny has a master’s degree in education and draws an annual salary of $50,000. (She works Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.) The couple also have someone who drives them back and forth to Princeton and who cooks, does the laundry and snakes the drains when they are clogged.