Sure, he's called Jacob Neilson and he wrote a shit tonne of books on the subject about ten years ago.

Although I understand that its the norm to ignore previous computing history for the illusion of inventing something, more so if it's pretty.

If you Google "checkout conversion remove field," you should see a number of articles on this, including some with A/B tests. The trend seems to be that the fewer fields shown or required, the better conversion is.