Alison Booth

Alison Booth
Born	Alison Lee Booth Melbourne, Australia
Academic background
Education	London School of Economics
Doctoral advisor	Tony Atkinson
Academic work
Discipline	Labour economics
Institutions	Australian National University University of Essex
Website	www.alisonbooth.net Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Alison Booth is an Australian labour economist, academic and novelist. She is an emeritus professor of economics at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research examines labour-market institutions, trade unions, training, gender differences, competition and risk preferences. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Booth has also published eight novels, including Stillwater Creek, The Philosopher's Daughters and Death at Booroomba, and has published fiction as A. L. Booth.

Early life and education

Booth was born in Melbourne and grew up in Sydney. Her father, Norman Booth, wrote the Australian war novel Up the Dusty Track.

Booth studied economics at the London School of Economics, receiving a Master of Science in economics in 1980 and a PhD in 1984. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, examined the microeconomic behaviour of trade unions and union membership.

Career

Booth began her academic career as a teaching assistant at the London School of Economics from 1981 to 1983. She subsequently held lectureships at the University of Bristol, City University London, Brunel University and Birkbeck College. She was professor of economics at the University of Essex from 1995 to 2013.

In 2002, Booth joined the Australian National University (ANU), where she was professor of economics until 2014 and is now an emeritus professor. She held the F. H. Gruen Professorship from 2002 to 2003 and served as head of the Economics Program in the university's Research School of Social Sciences from 2008 to 2010. Her visiting appointments have included the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Amsterdam and ANU.

Booth was editor-in-chief of Labour Economics from 1999 to 2004 and president of the European Association of Labour Economists from 2006 to 2008. She also served on the council of the European Society for Population Economics and on the council of the Royal Economic Society.

In 2017, Booth received the Distinguished Fellow Award from the Economic Society of Australia, and in 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Research

Booth's research is primarily in labour economics and also spans behavioural economics, experimental economics and the economics of gender. Her early work examined trade unions, wage determination, employment, redundancy payments and work-related training. Her later research has focused on gender differences in competition and risk-taking, single-sex education, labour-market discrimination, migration, and the influence of institutions and culture on economic behaviour.

In research on education and risk preferences, Booth and Patrick Nolen found that girls from single-sex schools were less risk-averse than girls from coeducational schools, which they associated with reduced exposure to gender norms. She has also studied women's willingness to take career risks when supported by other women.

Her comparative research has examined how institutions and culture influence competitive behaviour, including the effects of the Cultural Revolution in China and gender differences in competition in Japan and South Korea.

Booth and her co-authors have also studied the intergenerational effects of the Cultural Revolution, reporting lower trust and willingness to compete among descendants of people mistreated during the upheaval.

Her research on trade unions and migration found that active unions were associated with higher incomes, improved employment conditions and fewer mental-health problems among rural–urban migrant workers in China.

Booth has also investigated labour-market discrimination through callback rates for applicants with Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglo-Saxon-sounding names. She has advocated anonymous recruitment procedures while arguing that later stages of recruitment must also address bias.

Fiction

Booth has also published short stories and eight novels. In a 2026 interview, Booth draws out the analogies between economics and fiction. https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/crafting-crime-fiction-when-economics-and-creative-writing-collide

The first book in Booth's trilogy, Stillwater Creek (2010), "captures a particular time in Australian history – memories of the war are still relatively fresh, communism is the new fear, and social mores are still very conservative". In an interview, Booth said about the town of Jingera, "I like to think of [it] as... a stage on which a few actors play out the universal stories. Translated into French (Les Rivages du Souvenir) by Helene Collon for publication by Presses de la Cite in 2011, the novel was Highly Commended in the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award, and was published as a Select Edition in 2011 by Reader's Digest in Australasia and in the UK.

Booth's second novel, The Indigo Sky (2011), is set in late 1961. Booth "uses Jingera as a microcosm for the social and political issues faced by post-war Australia. [She]... weaves the gritty issues of paedophilia, racism and postwar trauma into her first book, and the removal of Aboriginal children and bullying into her second book, but manages to maintain a light and hopeful tone". The final book in the trilogy, A Distant Land (2012), is set in Jingera, Sydney and Cambodia in 1971. It focuses on "Human rights, civil liberties and war".

Booth's fourth novel, A Perfect Marriage (2018), is a "cleverly structured" story of middle-class "domestic violence" and its long term effects.

The fifth novel, The Philosopher's Daughters, was published in the UK on 2 April 2020. The novel explores race and gender in 19th-century Australia, and has been described as "wonderfully evocative".

Booth's sixth novel, The Painting, was published in the UK in July 2021. It "deftly explores the migration experience", and its author is described as "an elegant writer who excels at inhabiting the intellectual headspace of her characters".

Personal life

Booth is married and has two daughters.

Select bibliography

Books

• Booth, Alison L. (1995). The Economics of the Trade Union. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46839-8.
• Booth, Alison L.; Snower, Dennis J. (1996). Acquiring Skills: Market Failures, Their Symptoms, and Policy Responses. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47957-8.
• Booth, Alison L. (2026). Uneven Rewards: Milestones in Labour Economics. Australian National University Press. ISBN 978-1-76046-729-6.

Articles

• Booth, Alison L. (1985). "The Free Rider Problem and a Social Custom Model of Trade Union Membership". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 100 (1): 253–261. doi:10.2307/1885744. JSTOR 1885744.
• Arulampalam, Wiji; Booth, Alison L. (1998). "Training and Labour Market Flexibility: Is There a Trade-off?". British Journal of Industrial Relations. 36 (4): 521–536. doi:10.1111/1467-8543.00106.
• Booth, Alison L.; Francesconi, Marco; Frank, Jeff (2002). "Temporary Jobs: Stepping Stones or Dead Ends" (PDF). The Economic Journal. 112 (480): F189–F213. doi:10.1111/1468-0297.00043. hdl:10419/21049. S2CID 56458493.
• Booth, Alison L.; Francesconi, Marco; Frank, Jeff (2003). "A Sticky Floors Model of Promotion, Pay, and Gender". European Economic Review. 47 (2): 295–322. doi:10.1016/s0014-2921(01)00197-0.
• Booth, Alison L.; Bryan, Mark L. (2004). "The Union Membership Wage-Premium Puzzle: Is There a Free Rider Problem?". Industrial and Labor Relations Review. 57 (3): 402–421. doi:10.1177/001979390405700305. hdl:1885/86265. S2CID 3242792.
• Arulampalam, Wiji; Booth, Alison L.; Bryan, Mark L. (2007). "Is There a Glass Ceiling Over Europe? Exploring the Gender Pay Gap across the Wage Distribution" (PDF). ILR Review. 60 (2): 163–186. doi:10.1177/001979390706000201. S2CID 8475268.
• Booth, Alison L.; Van Ours, Jan C. (2008). "Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness: The Part-Time Work Puzzle" (PDF). The Economic Journal. 118 (526): F77–F99. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02117.x. hdl:10419/91984. S2CID 17505859.
• Booth, Alison; Coles, Melvyn (2010). "Education, Matching, and the Allocative Value of Romance" (PDF). Journal of the European Economic Association. 8 (4): 755–775. doi:10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.tb00539.x. hdl:20.500.11780/1149. S2CID 198591220.
• Booth, Alison L.; Leigh, Andrew; Varganova, Elenea (2011). "Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups? Evidence from a Field Experiment". Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. 74 (4): 547–573. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0084.2011.00664.x. S2CID 14100864.
• Booth, Alison L.; Nolen, Patrick (2012). "Choosing to Compete: How Different are Girls and Boys?". Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 81 (2): 542–555. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2011.07.018. S2CID 5284701.
• Booth, Alison L.; Nolen, Patrick (2012). "Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?". Economic Journal. 122 (668): F56–F78. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02480.x. S2CID 73518665.
• Booth, Alison L.; Cardona-Sosa, L.; Nolen, Patrick (2014). "Gender Differences in Risk Aversion: Do Single-sex Environments Affect Their Development?" (PDF). Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 99: 126–154. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2013.12.017. hdl:10784/7519. S2CID 52885972.
• Booth, Alison; Fan, Elliott; Zhang, Dandan; Xin, Meng (2019). "Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Culture and Institutions". The Economic Journal, 129: 734–764, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12583

Novels

• Booth, Alison (2010). Stillwater Creek. Read How You Want. ISBN 978-1-86471-125-7.
• Booth, Alison (2011). The Indigo Sky. Read How You Want. ISBN 978-1-74274-290-8.
• Booth, Alison (2012). A Distant Land. Random House Australia. ISBN 978-1-86471-194-3.
• Booth, Alison (2018). A Perfect Marriage. RedDoorPublishing. ISBN 978-1-910453-49-0.
• Booth, Alison (2020). The Philosopher's Daughters. RedDoor Press. ISBN 9781913062149
• Booth, Alison (2021). The Painting. RedDoor Press. ISBN 978-1-913062-65-1
• Booth, Alison (2023). Bellevue. RedDoor Press. ISBN 978-1-9997701-7-4
• Booth, A L (2025). Death at Booroomba. Ventura Press. ISBN 978-1-7638320-0-8

External links

• ANU Profile
• Website