Alison Booth

Alison L. Booth is an Australian labour economist and novelist who is Professor of Economics at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Jingera Trilogy which comprises three novels: Stillwater Creek, The Indigo Sky and A Distant Land. All three novels are set in the fictional coastal town of Jingera.

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

Booth has both a Masters of Economics and a PhD from the London School of Economics. Her dissertation under Tony Atkinson was on the microeconomic behaviour of trade unions and membership.

Booth worked at the University of Bristol and the University of Essex in the 1980s. She was editor-in-chief of Labour Economics from 1999–2004 and President of the European Association of Labour Economists from 2006–2008. She has worked in the areas of gender and discrimination in the labour force. Her research found that girls at single-sex schools are less risk averse than those at co-ed schools, perhaps due to the absence of "culturally driven norms and beliefs about the appropriate mode of female behaviour" and that women take more career risks when they are supported by other women. She has also called for blind recruiting due to her research into discrimination in callback rates for applicants with non-Anglo-Saxon sounding names.

Booth is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and an ANU Public Policy fellow. She is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and of the Institute for Employment Research in Nürnberg.

Fiction

Booth has also written numerous short stories and fiction novels.

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 saidabout 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 is married and has two daughters.

Books

• Booth, Alison L. (1995). The Economics of the Trade Union. Cambridge University Press. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Snower, Dennis J. (1996). Acquiring Skills: Market Failures, Their Symptoms, and Policy Responses. Cambridge University Press. 

Articles

• Booth, Alison L. (1985). "The Free Rider Problem and a Social Custom Model of Trade Union Membership". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 100: 253–261. 
• 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. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Francesconi, Marco; Frank, Jeff (2002). "Temporary Jobs: Stepping Stones or Dead Ends". The Economic Journal. 112: F189–F213. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Francesconi, Marco; Frank, Jeff (2003). "A Sticky Floors Model of Promotion, Pay, and Gender". European Economic Review. 47(2): 295–322. 
• 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". ILR Review. 60 (2): 163–186. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Van Ours, Jan C. (2008). "Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness: The Part-Time Work Puzzle". The Economic Journal. 118: F77–F99. 
• Booth, Alison; Coles, Melvyn (2010). "Education, Matching, and the Allocative Value of Romance". Journal of the European Economic Association. 8 (4): 755–775. 
• 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. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Nolen, Patrick (2012). "Choosing to Compete: How Different are Girls and Boys?". Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation. 81: 542–555. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Nolen, Patrick (2012). "Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?". Economic Journal. 122(668): F56–F78. 
• Booth, Alison L.; Cardona-Sosa, L.; Nolen, Patrick (2014). "Gender Differences in Risk Aversion: Do Single-sex Environments Affect Their Development?". Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation, Elsevier. 99(C): 126–154. 

Novels

• Booth, Alison (2010). Stillwater Creek. Read How You Want. ISBN 9781864711257. 
• Booth, Alison (2011). The Indigo Sky. Read How You Want. ISBN 9781742742908. 
• Booth, Alison (2012). A Distant Land. Random House Australia. ISBN 9781864711943.