Emily Oster

Emily Oster
Emily Fair Osteris an American economist. After receiving a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, where she studied under Amartya Sen, Oster joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she taught prior to moving to Brown University, where she currently holds the rank of Associate Professor of Economics. Her research interests are unusually wide-ranging, and span from development economics to health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
CountryUnited States of America
Good household decision-making often relies on thinking about your household like a firm.
Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses.
I think we've moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself.
Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring.
I've always loved doing research. I remember doing a research project on the Babylonian numeral system in the eighth grade and thinking, 'This is pretty awesome - is this really a job you can have?' This led me toward a career as an academic, although it took me until college to realise that economics was the right field.
I am extremely devoted to Amazon Prime - which offers speedier free deliveries, free movie streaming and other benefits for an annual fee - but I don't think it is great for groceries.
Nausea is a normal but unpleasant effect of pregnancy and a really good sign that it is going well. Women who experience nausea in early pregnancy are less likely to miscarry.
Lovingly crafted and super-creative cupcakes are not exactly on tap in my household after a full day at work, and I do not blame my mother for a second that they were not on tap in hers, either.
Much of what I do in my job is think about whether relationships we see in data are causal, as opposed to just reflecting correlations. It's exactly these issues which come up in evaluating studies in public health.
My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies.
To put it mildly, I'm not crazy about the implication that pregnant women are incapable of deciding for themselves.
The main concern with a very large baby is difficulty in delivery.
I think that there's a real sense in which pregnancy should be something that you do with your doctor, but I think that for a lot of women the time you have with your doctors is limited and it can be difficult to get all of the answers to your questions.
Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty - at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development - it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.