Emily Fair Oster is an American economist and bestselling author. After receiving a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She later moved to Brown University, where she is Professor of Economics. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research has received exposure among non-economists through the Wall Street Journal, the SuperFreakonomicsbestseller book, and her 2007 TED Talk, among other media sources. She is the author of two books, Expecting Better and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting.
Early life
Oster is the daughter of two economists, Sharon M Oster and Ray C Fair. When she was two years old, Oster's parents noticed that she talked to herself in her crib after they left her room. They placed a tape recorder in her room in order to find out what she was saying, and passed the tapes on to a linguist and psychologist they were friends with. Analysis of Oster's speech showed that her language was much more complex when she was alone than when interacting with adults. This led to her being the subject of a series of academic papers which were collectively published as a compendium in 1989 titled Narratives from the Crib. The book was reprinted in 2006, with a foreword by Emily.
Career
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 Hep B rates tended to have higher male-to female birth ratios. Oster argued that the fact that Hep 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." Oster noted that the use of Hep 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 evaluates new data and shows that her old 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. Oster's work on television and female empowerment in India was featured in Steve Levitt's second book, "SuperFreakonomics".
Books
In her book, Expecting Better, Oster discusses the data behind common pregnancy "rules" and argues many of them are misleading. On the guideline of avoiding alcohol consumption during pregnancy, she argues that there is no evidence that 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. As of March 2019, the book has sold over 100,000 copies. Her second book, Cribsheet, was published in April 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. 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.
Personal life
Emily is the daughter of Sharon M. Oster and Ray C. Fair, both professors of economics at Yale University. She married Jesse Shapiro, also an economist, in June 2006.
