Эмили Остер: Американ экономисі және зерттеушісі

American economist

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 three books, Expecting Better, The Family Firm, and Cribsheet, which discuss a data driven approach to decision making in pregnancy and parenting.

Oster was born on February 14, 1980, the daughter of economists Sharon Oster and Ray 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 with whom they were friends. 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 Oster. Oster graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1998, received an AB in economics from Harvard College in 2002, and received a PhD in economics from Harvard in 2006.

From 2006 to 2007, Oster was a Becker Fellow at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago, where she was an assistant professor at the Department of Economics from 2007 to 2009, an assistant professor at the Booth School of Business from 2009 to 2011, and an associate professor from 2011 to 2014. "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women," Oster noted that the use of hepatitis B vaccine in 1982 led to a sharp decline in the male to female birth ratio. 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.

Oster was an advocate for opening schools during the coronavirus epidemic, spearheading a project to collect data on the spread of coronavirus in schools, and appearing frequently in media discussing why schools should open. In early October 2020, she wrote an influential and much cited article in The Atlantic entitled "Schools Aren't Super Spreaders" which inspired numerous articles. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the CDC cited Oster's work as a reason to open schools during the pandemic. In August 2020, Oster launched a dashboard compiling information on the spread of COVID 19 in schools. Critics of Oster's dashboard said it had methodological problems that they believe undermine its usefulness. 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." On October 31, 2022, The Atlantic published an opinion piece written by Oster in which she called for "amnesty" following the COVID 19 pandemic, citing the "tremendous uncertainty" surrounding topics such as the virus, face masks, social distancing, school closures and COVID 19 vaccines.

Emily is the daughter of Sharon Oster and Ray Fair, both professors of economics at Yale University. She married Jesse Shapiro, also an economist, in June 2006, and they have two children.