Sharon Oster Honored with Carolyn Shaw Bell Award

Sharon Oster, the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship and director of the Program on Social Enterprise, is the 2011 recipient of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award of the American Economics Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. The Bell Award is given annually to an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession, through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession, and the mentoring of others.

Oster is a distinguished scholar and an expert in competitive strategy, microeconomic theory, industrial organization, the economics of regulation and antitrust, and nonprofit strategy. She has written extensively on the regulation of business and competitive strategy. She is the author of Modern Competitive Strategy, a textbook used at many management schools, and Strategic Management for Nonprofit Organizations, which emphasizes an economic approach to managing nonprofits. Oster recently joined fellow economists and educators Karl E. Case and Ray C. Fair as a co-author of the widely used introductory economics text Principles of Economics, currently in its 10th edition.

Oster, who joined the Yale School of Management in 1982, was the first woman to receive tenure at the school, and served as Yale SOM's first female dean from 2008 to 2011. Over her career at the school, she has played a leadership role in the growth and development of the school's economics faculty, and has shaped the economic thinking of the school's graduates. She was the first recipient of the Yale SOM Alumni Association Award for Teaching Excellence in 1988, and received the award again in 2008.

The Carolyn Shaw Bell Award will be presented to Oster at the committee's annual meeting on January 6, 2012, in Chicago.