Emily Oster

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

“As people do a task, they improve at it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Because economics is all about optimising, doing the best you can with what you have - it's usually the first place you should look for answers if you want to maximise your happiness.”

“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.”

“All's fair in love and purchasing.”

“The greatest moments are those when you see the result pop up in a graph or in your statistics analysis - that moment you realise you know something no one else does and you get the pleasure of thinking about how to tell them.”