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 began writing fiction with short stories published in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and has published eight novels. In a 2026 interview with ANU Reporter, she discussed parallels between economics and fiction writing.
Her debut novel, Stillwater Creek (2010), was the first volume of a trilogy set in the fictional Australian town of Jingera. A review in The Sunday Telegraph described the novel as portraying a period shaped by memories of the Second World War, fear of communism and conservative social conventions. The novel was highly commended in the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award. It was subsequently issued in condensed form through Reader's Digest Select Editions in Australasia and the United Kingdom. It was also translated into French by Hélène Collon as Les Rivages du Souvenir and published by Presses de la Cité in 2011.
The trilogy continued with The Indigo Sky (2011), which uses Jingera to explore social and political issues in postwar Australia, including the removal of Aboriginal children and bullying. The final volume, A Distant Land (2012), is set in Jingera, Sydney and Cambodia in 1971 and addresses human rights, civil liberties and war.
Booth's later novels are A Perfect Marriage (2018), The Philosopher's Daughters (2020), The Painting (2021), Bellevue (2023) and Death at Booroomba (2025). A Perfect Marriage concerns domestic violence and its long-term effects. It was highly commended in the 2019 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards, while The Philosopher's Daughters was highly commended in the 2022 ACT Notables Awards. The Philosopher's Daughters explores race and gender in nineteenth-century Australia, while The Painting examines the migration experience through an art-theft mystery.
Booth's seventh novel, Bellevue (2023), is set in the Blue Mountains in 1972 and was described by Region Canberra as combining social commentary with elements of a psychological thriller. Her eighth novel, Death at Booroomba (2025), was published under the name A L Booth by Ventura Press. The historical murder mystery is set in postwar rural Australia and explores war trauma, prejudice and parochialism.
Selected honours and awards
2019 – Elected Fellow of the Econometric Society 2017 – Distinguished Fellow Award, Economic Society of Australia 2015 – Founding Fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists 2005 – Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia 1999 – Appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Personal life Booth is married and has two daughters.
Select bibliography Books
Booth, Alison L. (2026). Uneven Rewards: Milestones in Labour Economics. Australian National University Press. .
Articles
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 (2020). The Philosopher's Daughters. RedDoor Press. Booth, Alison (2021). The Painting. RedDoor Press. Booth, Alison (2023). Bellevue. RedDoor Press. Booth, A L (2025). Death at Booroomba. Ventura Press.
References
External links ANU Profile Website