Insightology

Emily Oster is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the University of Chicago. Her research reaches outside the traditional boundaries of economics to larger health and policy questions. Her claim to fame is her disputing the Nobel winner Amartya Sen's contention from two decades ago that there were 100 million "missing" women, quite possibly because of misogynistic attitudes in developing countries.

She showed that prevalence of Hepatitis B accounted for half of them because it skewed the sex ratio in favor of boys. What is more interesting is that when some follow-up research showed her conclusions may be wrong, she herself conducted a follow-up study and published a paper on why and where her previous results were wrong.  Thanks to her, an important topic has seen much research and new insight. More recently she has worked on the problem of AIDS in Africa upending traditional assumptions, as shown here and here .

Readers of Malcolm Gladwell's best seller "The Tipping Point" may remember a section centered on a project called "Narratives from the Crib" where two parents decided to tape record the nightly dialog they had with their daughter and her monologs after they left. When analyzed, the recordings showed that the two year old girl had remarkably more complex discussions with herself than with them, leading linguistic researchers to question prior developmental theories. As it turns out, "baby Emily" from the book is none other than Emily Oster! As it also turns out her father, mentioned as a professor from New Haven, is actually the Yale economist Ray Fair. Prof Fair has developed a very simple model for predicting presidential elections. It does not consider polls, swing voters, scandals etc, instead focusing on variables such as growth, inflation and incumbent party. For the 2008 presidential election you can take the model for a spin here. Note that Prof Fair has already accounted for the unchanging variables (incumbent President not running etc) in the constant, leaving only three variables to manipulate. Have fun!       

Emily Oster is married to Jesse Shapiro who is also an economist at the University of Chicago and a powerhouse in his own right. He also works on non-traditional topics such as where media bias comes from.