The center of gravity for economic thought in the United States has long been found along the 2 miles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that run between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But there is new competition for that title, and it is quite a bit farther west.

Stanford University has lured an all-star lineup of economists to Palo Alto, California, in the last few years — and fended off Harvard’s and MIT’s attempts to woo Stanford economists.

The newest Stanford professors include a Nobel laureate — Alvin Roth, formerly of Harvard — but the shift is more noticeable among top young economists. Of the 11 people who have won the John Bates Clark Medal for best economist younger than 40 since 2000, four are at Stanford, more than at any other university. Two of them joined in the past few months: the inequality researcher Raj Chetty, who came from Harvard, and Matthew Gentzkow, who left the University of Chicago.

Stanford’s success with economists is part of a larger campaign to stake a claim as the country’s top university. Its draw combines a status as the nation’s “it” university — now with the lowest undergraduate acceptance rate and a narrow No. 2 behind Harvard for the biggest fundraising haul — with its proximity to many of the world’s most dynamic companies. Its battle with Eastern universities echoes fights in other industries in which established companies, whether hotels or automobile-makers, are being challenged by Silicon Valley money and entrepreneurship.

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, MIT, 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 past four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty 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 policymakers 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 MIT (the last without one was Janet 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 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 MIT.

But the recent recruiting success of Stanford shows something broader about how the economics profession is changing. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.

That trend is evident across leading economics departments — the traditional powerhouses have plenty of scholars doing work in the same vein, including work by Esther Duflo at MIT on how to test ways to fight global poverty and by Roland G. Fryer Jr. at Harvard on the roots of racial inequality. But the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.

“I was very happy where I was in Chicago, but it felt like there is a sense of excitement and really building something at Stanford,” Gentzkow said. “Stanford as a university is in a really strong position right now and has a lot of resources, and seems very committed to using those resources to build on the frontier of economics.”

Chetty, who left Harvard for Stanford, saw benefits in the concentration of research that uses Big Data, large sets of research that are hard to compile and analyze. His work has examined, for example, whether the quality of a kindergarten teacher has long-lasting effects on a person’s life and earnings.

“Some of the attraction of the Bay Area is simply the fact that there are exciting opportunities with data and methods and machine learning,” he said. And that type of work requires lab space that more closely resembles that needed in the hard sciences — a fact Stanford has exploited.

Less clear is whether the agglomeration of economic stars at Stanford will ever amount to the kind of coherent school of thought that has been achieved at some other great universities.

The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. MIT’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policymakers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.

“There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”

And in its recent recruiting, Stanford may have had a secret weapon, coming from the skies. “Even the weather cooperated with us this year,” Bernheim said. “Nine feet of snow in Boston this past winter couldn’t have hurt.”