Product Code Database
Emily Fair Oster (born February 14, 1980) is an American economist who has served as the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Brown University since 2019, where she has been a professor of economics since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research was brought to the attention of non-economists through the Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Oster is the author of four books, Expecting Better, The Family Firm, The Unexpected, and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting.
After graduating from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1998, Oster studied economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts. She then did doctoral studies in economics at Harvard under Michael Kremer. She received a Ph.D. in 2006 with a thesis titled "The Economics of Infectious Disease".
Oster has been a research associate at the NBER since 2015, where she was a faculty research fellow from 2006 to 2015, and has been an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 2014.
Oster's research focuses generally on development economics and health. In 2005, Oster published a dissertation for her economics Ph.D. from Harvard University, which suggested that the unusually high ratio of men to women in China was partially due to the effects of the hepatitis B virus. "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women," pointed to findings that suggested areas with high hepatitis B rates tended to have higher male-to female birth ratios. Oster argued that the fact that hepatitis B can cause a woman to conceive male children more often than female, accounted for a bulk of the "missing women" in Amartya Sen's 1990 essay, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing."Sen, Amartya, "More Than 100 Million Womer Are Missing, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 20 Oster noted that the use of hepatitis B vaccine in 1982 led to a sharp decline in the male-to-female birth ratio. Sen's essay had attributed the "missing women" to societal discrimination against girls and women in the form of the allocation of health, educational, and food resources.
In April 2008, Oster released a working paper "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China" in which she evaluated new data, which showed that her original research was incorrect. Freakonomics author Steven Levitt saw this as a sign of integrity.
In a 2007 TED Talk, Oster discussed the spread of HIV in Africa, applying a cost-benefit analysis to the question of why African men have been slow to change their sexual behavior.
In the book, Oster argues against the general rule of thumb to avoid alcohol consumption while pregnant, contends that there is no evidence that (low) levels of alcohol consumption by pregnant women adversely affect their children. This claim, however, has drawn criticism from the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and others.
Her second book, Cribsheet, was published in April 2019 and was a New York Times best seller. It evaluates and reviews the research on a variety of parenting topics relating to infants and toddlers, including breastfeeding, safe sleep guidelines, sleep training, and potty training. The week of April 28, 2019, Cribsheet was also the best selling book in Washington, DC according to the Post.
Her third book, The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, applies to school age children. A review discusses the relationship of her parenting approach to more permissive parenting ideas dating back to the pre-Reagan era. Oster suggests that parents run their families like firms in order to maximize their children's' advantage over others.
On May 18, 2021, Oster published another piece in The Atlantic titled "Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma", which generated much heated response. The controversy surrounds Oster use of vaccination as an individualistic risk-reward proposition, insinuating that unvaccinated kids are still relatively safe from COVID, and the lack of mention of kids being spreaders of the infections themselves. Critics pointed out such rhetoric may lead the lay audience to wrongly believe there is no urgent need to vaccinate.
In September 2021, Oster launched the COVID-19 School Data Hub which includes information on virtual and in person status of schools across 31 states. According to The New York Times, the data hub is "one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to document how schools operated during the pandemic."
|
|
