Alison Booth

Alison L. Booth is an Australian labour economist and novelist who is emeritus professor of economics at the Australian National University. In addition, she has published eight novels as an author.

Early life and education 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 Professor Sir Anthony Atkinson was on the microeconomic behaviour of trade unions and membership.

Career Booth's research interests cover labour economics, behavioural economics, and the economics of gender. She lectured at the University of Bristol in the 1980s and was Professor of Economics the University of Essex from 1995 to 2013. In 2017, Booth received the Distinguished Fellow Award of the Economic Society of Australia, and in 2019 she was elected as fellow of the Econometric Society. She has also spent time on the Council of the European Society of Population Economists. 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. Her research has also investigated how competitive behaviour in China was affected by the Cultural Revolution and she has used field data to study the impact of culture on male and female competitive behaviour in Japan and in South Korea. Booth has also called for blind recruiting due to her research into discrimination in callback rates for applicants with non-Anglo-Saxon sounding names.

Fiction Booth has also published short stories and eight novels. 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. 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". 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. RedDoor Press. Booth, Alison (2021). The Painting. RedDoor Press. Booth, Alison (2023). Bellevue. RedDoor Press. Booth, A L (2025). Death at Booroomba. Ventura Press.