Emily Oster

Emily Fair Oster (born February 14, 1980) is an American economist who has served since 2019 as the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Brown University, 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 four books, Expecting Better, The Family Firm, The Unexpected, and Cribsheet, which discuss a data-driven approach to decision-making in pregnancy and parenting. Oster is also the founder of ParentData.org, a data-driven parenting information platform.

Early life Oster was born on February 14, 1980, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her parents, Sharon Oster and Ray Fair, were both professors of economics at Yale University. 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 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 that were published in 1989 as a compendium, Narratives from the Crib.

After graduating from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1998, Oster studied economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts. She then did doctoral studies in economics at Harvard under Michael Kremer. She received a Ph.D. in 2006 with a thesis titled "The Economics of Infectious Disease".

Career 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.

In 2026, Oster launched the "Wellness, Actually" Podcast with F. Perry Wilson on iHeartMedia to combat social media misinformation about wellness topics.

Books In her book Expecting Better, published in 2013, Oster criticizes conventional pregnancy customs, taboos and mores. She discusses the data behind common pregnancy practices and argues that many of them are misleading. As of 2019, the book had sold over 100,000 copies. A revised and updated version of the book was published in 2021.

In the book, Oster argues against the general rule of thumb to avoid alcohol consumption while pregnant, contending that there is no evidence that (low) levels of alcohol consumption by pregnant women adversely affect their children. This claim has drawn criticism from the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and others.

Her second book, Cribsheet, was published in 2019 and was a New York Times best seller. 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, D.C.

Her third book, The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, applies to school-age children. A review discusses the relationship of her parenting approach to more permissive parenting ideas dating to the pre-Reagan era. Oster suggests that parents run their families like firms in order to maximize their children's advantage over others.

COVID-19 and schools Oster was an advocate for opening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, spearheading a project to collect data on the virus's spread 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, "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 COVID-19's spread in schools. Critics of Oster's dashboard said it had methodological problems that undermined its usefulness.

On May 18, 2021, Oster published another piece in The Atlantic, "Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma", which generated much heated controversy over her treatment of vaccination as an individual risk-reward proposition, insinuation that unvaccinated kids are relatively safe from COVID, and failure to mention that kids spread the infection themselves.

Personal life 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 2006, and they have two children.