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" 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. "

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" Much of what I do in my job is think about whether relationships we see in data are causal, as opposed to just reflecting correlations. It's exactly these issues which come up in evaluating studies in public health. "

Emily Oster

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

" 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. "

" No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that's why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting. "

" If you have a traditional view of economics, you're probably thinking of Ben Bernanke making Fed policy, or the guys creating financial derivatives at Goldman Sachs. "

" I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top. "

" I am extremely devoted to Amazon Prime - which offers speedier free deliveries, free movie streaming and other benefits for an annual fee - but I don't think it is great for groceries. "

" Talking to women about birth can be polarizing. "

" 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. "

" You work hard for your income, and that hard work is what fuels the economy. "

" 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. "

" My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies. "

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

" For many women - myself included - pregnancy brings on tremendous anxiety and confusion, along with the joy. "

" All's fair in love and purchasing. "

" Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. "

" 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! "

" The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring. "

" Prenatal testing is a complicated decision for many women, forcing us to confront concerns about a disabled child and risks of miscarriage. "

" Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one. "

" 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. "

" The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, they would do worse in school. "

" Nausea is a normal but unpleasant effect of pregnancy and a really good sign that it is going well. Women who experience nausea in early pregnancy are less likely to miscarry. "

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

" In short, humans are programmed to get bored. "