Quotes from Emily Oster

If everyone is good at something different, assigning chores is easy. If your partner is great at grocery shopping and you are great at the laundry, you're set. But this isn't always - or even usually - the case.

How much is an hour of your time worth? It's worth whatever wage you would get if you spent that hour working. If you work for an hourly rate, this is an easy calculation. Even if you work for a salary and a fixed number of hours, the principle is the same: It's whatever your salary works out to per hour.

Adhering to budgeting rules shouldn't trump good decision-making.

I travel a fair amount, read on the plane, and I read fast.

Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty - at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development - it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.

Almost every woman I have spoken to about pregnancy has a story about her doctor giving her a hard time about her weight. Later in my pregnancy it felt like all of my time with my doctor was focused on how fat I was getting - so fat!

I think we've moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself.

I think that there's a real sense in which pregnancy should be something that you do with your doctor, but I think that for a lot of women the time you have with your doctors is limited and it can be difficult to get all of the answers to your questions.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

Lovingly crafted and super-creative cupcakes are not exactly on tap in my household after a full day at work, and I do not blame my mother for a second that they were not on tap in hers, either.

As people do a task, they improve at it.

The main concern with a very large baby is difficulty in delivery.

Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.

In short, humans are programmed to get bored.

If you asked me which gives me more joy, my work or my family, there is no question that it's my family. Hands down. If I had to give one up, it wouldn't even be a contest.

The biggest food-related risk in pregnancy is listeria. It's a dangerous bacteria, to which pregnant women are especially susceptible, that can lead to miscarriage or stillbirth.

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

I've always loved doing research. I remember doing a research project on the Babylonian numeral system in the eighth grade and thinking, 'This is pretty awesome - is this really a job you can have?' This led me toward a career as an academic, although it took me until college to realise that economics was the right field.

To put it mildly, I'm not crazy about the implication that pregnant women are incapable of deciding for themselves.

The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.

When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I'm an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.

The enjoyment of work - to the extent that you have any - is likely highest in the first hours of the day when you are fresh, not tired, working on the most important things.

I think women - relative to men - tend to feel that they have to do the household chores on top of everything else. This becomes even worse once you have kids. It's enough to have a full time job; a full time job plus a family is even more.