Emily Oster

Emily Fair Oster is an American economist. After receiving an B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster moved to the University of Chicago where she is now a Becker Fellow, which is a two year position at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory [ [http://research.chicagogsb.edu/pricetheory/fellowships/index.aspx Becker Fellowships - Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory ] ] . She has recently accepted a position in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

Oster is perhaps most well-known for her PhD dissertation, "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women,"cite web | title=Oster's Ph.D dissertation on 'Missing Women' | year=2005 | publisher=Journal of Political Economy | url=http://home.uchicago.edu/~eoster/hepb.pdf | accessdate=2007-08-01] in which she suggests that biology can be used to reveal the truth about the missing-women puzzle. cite web | title=The Search for 100 Million Missing Women | year=2005 | publisher=Slate | url=http://www.slate.com/id/2119402/ | accessdate=2006-10-15] 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. cite web | title=The Search for 100 Million Missing Women | year=2005 | publisher=Slate | url=http://www.slate.com/id/2119402/ | accessdate=2006-10-15]

These conclusions have been disputed by Avraham Ebenstein, whose work (focused on the more recent period, after Oster's analysis) finds that unnaturally high male-to-female ratios occur only for children born after the first-born. This suggests that sex-selective abortion is mostly responsible for the "missing women".cite web | title=Fertility Choices and Sex Selection in Asia: Analysis and Policy | year=2007 | url=http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~ebenstei/Ebenstein_Avraham_JM1.pdf]

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 admits that her old research was flawed. "cite web | title=Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China | year=2008 | url=http://home.uchicago.edu/~eoster/hbvnotecon.pdf | accessdate=2008-05-21] This has been seen as a sign of integrity by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt [ [http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/an-academic-does-the-right-thing/ An Academic Does the Right Thing] ] .

Oster's current work focuses primarily on HIV in Africa.

Early life

When Emily was a toddler her parents were curious about what she says to herself when alone, so they would turn on a recording machine and left it running as they tuck her into bed at night. Those tapes were eventually passed on to their psychologist and linguists friends. Emily's speech was later carefully analyzed and was the subject of analysis for a series of academic papers. Those papers are collective published as a compendium in 1989 titled Narratives from the Crib. The book is published again in 2006, featuring a foreword written by Emily.cite web | title=The Search for 100 Million Missing Women | year=2005 | publisher=Slate | url=http://www.slate.com/id/2119402/ | accessdate=2006-10-15]

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 a Becker Fellow and young economistcite web | title=Jesse Shapiro | year=2006 | publisher=University of Chicago | url=http://home.uchicago.edu/~jmshapir/ | accessdate=2006-10-15] in June 2006.cite web | title=Emily Oster and Jesse Shapiro | year=2006 | publisher=New York Times | url=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fashion/weddings/18oste.html?pagewanted=all/ | accessdate=2007-12-31]

References