Emily Oster

Emily Fair Oster (born c. 1980) is 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 (as she did at Chicago). Her research interests are unusually wide-ranging, and span from development economics to health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her work is perhaps best-known among non-economists for her writings and appearances in mainstream media, including the Wall Street Journal, the best-selling SuperFreakonomics book, and her 2007 TED Talk.

When Emily was two years old, her parents noticed that she often talked to herself in her crib after they said good night and left her room. In order to figure out what she was saying, they placed a tape recorder in her room, which they turned on once they had tucked her in. Those tapes were eventually passed on to psychologist and linguist friends of her parents. Careful analysis of Emily'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.

Oster is well known for her PhD dissertation, "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women," in which she suggests that biology can be used to reveal the truth about the missing-women puzzle. Oster points to findings that areas with high Hep B rates tend to have higher male-to female birth ratios. The fact that Hep B can cause a woman to conceive male children more often than female, she says, accounts for a bulk of the "missing women" in Amartya Sen's famous 1990 essay, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing." Sen, on the other hand, attributed the "missing women" to societal discrimination against girls and women in the form of the allocation of health, educational, and even food resources. The use of Hep B vaccine in 1982 led to a sharp decline in the male-to-female birth ratio, she notes in her dissertation.

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