And it is a reflection of a broader shift in the study of economics, in which the most cutting-edge work increasingly relies less on a big-brained individual scholar developing mathematical theories, and more on the ability to crunch extensive sets of data to glean insights about topics as varied as how incomes differ across society and how industries organize themselves.

“Who wouldn’t want to be where the future of the world is being made?” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and regular contributor to The New York Times) who often blogs about trends in academic economics. Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”

In economics, Stanford has frequently been ranked just behind Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and the University of Chicago, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey of graduate school rankings, conducted in 2013, and in calculations of which department’s scholars are most frequently cited in academic literature. That might change. In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.

That said, Stanford’s reputation in the future may depend less on a few big-name recruits than on its ability to train the Ph.D.s whose scholarship is widely cited and reshapes important economic debates, or who become influential policy makers who advise presidents and lead central banks. The last 10 people to serve as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers have all had a Ph.D. from either Harvard or M.I.T. (the last without one was Janet L. Yellen, who left the job in 1999, and received hers from Yale). Among the Ph.D. economists who have exerted great influence on global economic policy in recent years, the former Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke; the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi; the retiring International Monetary Fund chief economist, Olivier Blanchard; and the Fed vice chairman, Stanley Fischer, all studied at M.I.T.

Unsurprisingly, many of those with top East Coast programs view Cambridge’s intellectual leadership role as safe. “Stanford’s keen interest in recruiting Harvard faculty is testimony to our strength,” said David Laibson, chairman of the Harvard economics department. “We’ve got a big target on our back because many of the world’s most exciting, creative, and innovative scholars are on our faculty, and Stanford is rightly going for some of them.” He notes that his department has lots of collaboration with other schools at Harvard, and that nearby M.I.T. and the National Bureau of Economic Research create a deep concentration of economic thinking, and said the department is on a recruiting push of its own.