Emily Oster
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Emily Oster is an American economist. After receiving an A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002 and 2006 respectively, Oster moved to the University of Chicago where she is now a Becker Fellow. She is married to Jesse Shapiro, also a Becker Fellow and young star economist. [1]
Oster is perhaps most 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. [2] 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 alter the gender of a fetus, 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 "mission 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. [2]
[edit] References
- ^ Jesse Shapiro. University of Chicago (2006). Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
- ^ a b The Search for 100 Million Missing Women. Slate (2005). Retrieved on 2006-10-15.
