Alison L. Booth

• PhD (Economics, LSE.
• Professor at Australian National University

In this paper we investigate the degree to which a major political upheaval can, through personal experience and intergenerational transmission, change behavioural norms. We focus on the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution (CR), which seriously disrupted many aspects of Chinese society. In particular, we explore how individuals’ behavioural preferences a...

We chart the evolution of gender differences in performance across single-sex and mixed-sex environments. Our dataset comprises over one million person-race observations of individuals making their racing debut over the period 1997-2012, and randomly assigned by the Japanese Speedboat Racing Association into single-sex and mixed-sex races. This ran...

Gender differences in paid performance have been found in many laboratory‐based competitive experiments. They have been attributed to men and women responding differently to psychological pressure. To explore this further, we conducted a laboratory experiment comprising 444 subjects, and measured gender differences in performance in four distinct c...

We compare the performance of high-ability adolescent girls and boys who participated in a long-running Korean television quiz show. There is a significant gender gap in performance – in favour of boys – when we pool all round 1 episodes of the quiz show. To investigate underlying mechanisms that might explain this, we explore how performance varie...

Using a panel survey, the authors investigate how the welfare of rural-urban migrant workers in China is affected by trade union presence at the workplace. Controlling for individual fixed effects, they find the following. Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union me...

We examine the effect of single-sex classes on the educational attainment of students within a coeducational university. Before students arrived on campus, we randomly assigned them to all-female, all-male, and coed classes, and thereby avoid the selection issues present in earlier studies on single-sex education of students in primary and secondar...

Using Vietnamese panel data, we investigate how a father’s temporary migration is associated with the labor supply and human capital investment of his child left behind. Our analysis shows that a longer absence of a father is associated with more housework and less education of his son if the boy is at an age for primary or lower secondary schoolin...

Our Beijing‐based laboratory experiment investigated gender differences in competitive choices across different birth‐cohorts experiencing ‐ during their crucial developmental‐age‐different institutions and social norms. To control for general time trends, we use Taipei counterpart subjects with identical original Confucian traditions. Our findings...

In speedboat racing in Japan, men and women compete under the same conditions and are randomly assigned to mixed-sex or single-sex groups for each race. We use a sample of over 140,000 individual-level records to examine how male-dominated circumstances affect women's racing performance. Our fixed-effects estimates reveal that women's race time is...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labour markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive models should be used whenever researchers are modelli...

We summarize our two sets of controlled experiments designed to see whether single-sex classes within co-educational environments modify students' risk-taking attitudes. In Booth and Nolen (2012b), subjects are in school years 10 and 11, while in Booth et al. (2014), they are first-year university students randomly assigned to single-sex and co-edu...

In this paper we utilise data from a unique new birth‐cohort study to see how the risk preferences of young people are affected by cognitive skills and gender. We find that cognitive ability (measured by the percentile ranking for university entrance at age 18) has no effect on risk preferences measured at age 20. This is in contrast to experimenta...

We examine the effect of single-sex classes on the pass rates, grades, and course choices of students in a coeducational university. We randomly assign students to all-female, all-male, and coed classes and, therefore, get around the selection issues present in other studies on single-sex education. We find that one hour a week of single-sex educat...

We develop a model of partnership and marriage based upon individual abilities and match-specific returns. A theoretical result is that marriage and same-sex partnership positively select more able individuals, while the effect of unmarried heterosexual partnership is ambiguous. We conduct empirical analysis with a unique new data source on marital...

In the absence of a broad-based pension scheme, the elderly in developing countries may rely on monetary transfers made by their children and on their own labour supply. This article examines whether monetary transfers from children help to reduce elderly parents' need to work. Taking the possible endogeneity of children's transfers in the parents'...

Using a controlled experiment, we investigate if individuals’ risk preferences are affected by (i) the gender composition of the group to which they are randomly assigned, and (ii) the gender mix of the school they attend. Our subjects, from eight publicly funded single-sex and coeducational schools, were asked to choose between a real-stakes lotte...

Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we show that salience affects young men and women differently, even after c...

Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates. Students were randomly assigned to classes of three types: al...

The first Australian universities were established in the 1850s, well before the introduction of compulsory schooling. However it was not until the twentieth century that growing industrialisation, technological change and the development of the so-called 'knowledge industries' fed into an increased demand in Australia for better-educated workers....

We use new training data from waves 3–6 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate training and wages of full-time men. We explore the extent to which the data are consistent with the predictions of human capital theory or with recent alternative theories based on imperfectly competitive labour markets. Accordin...

We conduct a large-scale audit discrimination study to measure labor market discrimination across different minority groups in Australia -- a country where one quarter of the population was born overseas. To denote ethnicity, we use distinctively Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern names, and our goal is a comparison acros...

Part-time jobs are popular among partnered women in many countries. In the Netherlands the majority of partnered working women have a part-time job. Our paper investigates, from a supply-side perspective, if the current situation of abundant part-time work in the Netherlands is likely to be a transitional phase that will culminate in many women wor...

Societies are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labor supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two separate matching paradigms for agents with heterogeneous abi...

Using data from five waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey, we find evidence of significant urban-rural expenditure inequality. Urban-rural inequality in Vietnam increased dramatically from 1993 to 1998, and peaked in 2002 before reducing slightly in 2004, and significantly in 2006. The urban-rural gap also monotonically increases a...

In this paper we estimate the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm, using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Estimation of this elasticity is of particular interest not only in its own right but also because of its relevance to the debate about the competitiveness of labour markets. The essence of...

Recent studies by economists have focused on cultural transmission from the origin country rather than the origin family. Our paper extends this research by investigating how "family-specific"'cultural transmission' can affect fertility rates. Following Machado and Santos Silva ["Journal of the American Statistical Association" (2005) Vol. 100, p....

Past research nds that males outperform females in competitive situations. Using data from multiple-round math tournaments, we verify this nding during the initial round of competition. The performance gap between males and females, however, disappears after the rst round. In later rounds, only math ability (not gender) serves as a signi cant predi...

Taking into account interdependence within the family, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and family wellbeing. We use panel data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. We find that part-time women are more satisfied with working hours than full-time women, and that women's life satisfaction i...

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate if family size and birth order affect children’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade-off between child quantity and “quality” and that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of parental resources devoted to children’s education. We construct a new birth order ind...

This paper considers how asymmetric tax treatment, where labour market earnings are taxed but household production is untaxed, affects educational choice and labour supply. We show that taxes on labour market earnings can generate a large (non-marginal) switch to home production and the ensuing deadweight losses are large. Using a cross-country pan...

In this paper we estimate the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm, using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Estimation of this elasticity is of particular interest because of its relevance to the debate about the competitiveness of labour markets. The essence of monopsonistically competitive labou...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father’s temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labour supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is children aged 7-18 in households in which both parents usual...

According to the 1911 Census, the proportion female of those receiving university education was around 22%, growing to 29% in 1921. By 1952 it had dropped to under 20%, due to easy access into universities for returning war-veterans. From the early 1950s, the university-educated gender gap began to reduce in response to women’s changing expectation...

Using a unique data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of academics and administrators at British universities, we estimate the impact of personal relationships upon earnings for men and women. While university data cover a relatively homogeneous group of workers, the two sides of the university are very different, with ad...

Using unique survey data, we find a significant gap in the self-assessed health of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The former have significantly worse health and almost half of the Indigenous health gap is explained by differences in economic variables.

A worker's output depends not only on his/her own ability but also on that of colleagues, who can facilitate the performance of tasks that each individual cannot accomplish on his/her own. We show that this common-sense observation generates monopsony power and is sufficient to explain why employers might expend resources on training employ...

We investigate the relationship between part-time work and working hours satisfaction, job satisfaction and life satisfaction. We account for interdependence within the family using data on partnered men and women from the British Household Panel Survey. Men have the highest hours-of-work satisfaction if they work full-time without overtime hours b...

The issues surrounding poverty and inequality continue to be of central concern to academics, politicians and policy makers but the ways in which we seek to study and understand them continue to change over time. This accessible new book seeks to provide a guide to some of the new approaches that have been developed in the light of international in...

We use new training data from the British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which the data are consistent with the predictions of human capital theory. According to the raw data, most work-related training is general and is paid for by employers. Our fixed effects estimates reveal that employer-financed training is associated with hig...

We model educational investment and labour supply in a competitive economy with home and market production. Heterogeneous workers are assumed to have different productivities both at home and in the workplace. Following Rosen (1983), we show that there are private increasing returns to education at the labour market participation margin. We show th...

This paper considers optimal educational investment and labour supply with increasing returns to scale in the earnings function In so doing we develop the work of Rosen (1983), who first highlighted the increasing returns argument that arises because private returns to human capital investment are increasing in subsequent utilization rates. We demo...

This paper considers educational investment, wages and hours of market work in an imperfectly competitive labour market with heterogeneous workers and home production. It investigates the degree to which there might be both underemployment in the labour market and underinvestment in education. A central insight is that the ex post participation dec...

Using harmonized data for the years 1995-2001 from the European Community Household Panel, the authors analyze gender pay gaps by sector across the wage distribution in eleven countries. In estimations that control for the effects of individual characteristics at different points of the distribution, they calculate the part of the gap attributable...

Hypothetical bias is a persistent problem in stated preference studies. We propose and test a method for reducing hypothetical bias based on the cognitive dissonance literature in social psychology. A central element of this literature is that people prefer not to take inconsistent stands and will change their attitudes and behavior to make them co...

Time and value are related concepts that influence human behaviour. Although classical topics in human thinking throughout the ages, few environmental economic non-market valuation studies have attempted to link the two concepts. Economists have estimated non-market environmental values in monetary terms for over 30 years. This history of valuation...

A new measure of 'voraciousness' in leisure activities is introduced as an indicator of the pace of leisure, facili-tating a theoretical linkage between the literature on time pressure, busyness and harriedness in late modernity, and the literature on cultural consumption. On the methodological side it is shown that time use diaries can pro-vide at...

We develop a model of monopsonistic wage competition with heterogenous worker ability and intra-firm production complementarities. We use this to illustrate the conditions under which: (i) the divergence between wages and productivity is an equilibrium phenomena; and (ii) this divergence is increasing in worker ability. While the first result is we...

We use unique retrospective family background data from the 2003 British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which family size and birth order affect a child’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and ‘quality’. Family size might adversely affect the production of child quality within a f...

Using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences, we explore gender, pay and promotions. In addition to earnings and productivity measures, we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination. We find both a gender promotions gap and a within-rank gender pay gap. A driving factor may be outside offers:...

We confront the predictions of various theories with new training data from the British Household Panel Survey. We find that employer-financed training is associated with significantly higher wages at current and future firms, with a larger impact in future firms. This is consistent with human capital theory with credit constraints and with the new...

A friend had a job playing in The Mousetrap in London. It was a one-year contract (with no chance of renewal), involved 8 shows a week (6 evenings and 2 matinees), and contained a gratuity clause where he would be penalised £50 (from the end-of-contract gratuity) for every show he missed, even if due to illness. This contract reflects the sort of l...

We model educational investment and labor supply in a competitive economy with home and market production. Heterogeneous workers are assumed to have different productivities both at home and in the workplace. We investigate the degree to which there is under-investment in human capital, and examine the deadweight losses that accrue via distortionar...

Using harmonised data from the European Union Household Panel, we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries. We find first, that quantile regression estimates are preferred to the OLS estimates, which give a misleading picture of gender pay gaps. Second, gender pay gaps are typically bigger at the top and the...

Using harmonised data from the European Union Household Panel, we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries. We find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution. We use quantile regression (QR) techniques to control for the effects of...

Using linked employer-employee data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we find a positive correlation between workplace union recognition and private-sector employer-provided training. We explore the avenues through which union recognition might affect training by interacting recognition with the closed shop, the level at wh...

This paper uses the data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to examine the impact of vocational education and training received over the period 1981 to 1991 on the wages growth of young men in employment in both 1981 and 1991. Issues of sample selectivity and of training endogeneity are also addressed. In particular, the paper examine...

This paper uses panel and retrospective life history data from an important new data source - the British Household Panel Survey - to establish some stylised facts about the unemployment experiences of men. In particular, we investigate the proportion of the sample who suffer from repeated unemployment spells, the origin and destination states of u...

Using the European Community Household Panel, we investigate gender differences in training participation over the period 1994-1999. We focus on lifelong learning, fixed-term contracts, part-time versus full-time work, public/private sector affiliation, and educational attainment. Women are typically no less likely than men to train. While there is...

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we estimate the impact of the national minimum wage, introduced in April 1999, on the work-related training of low-wage workers. We use two 'treatment groups'- those workers who explicitly stated they were affected by the new minimum and those workers whose derived 1998 wages were below the minimum. Using d...

Economists have long suggested that labor unions suffer a free rider problem. The argument is that, since union-set wages are available to all workers covered by unions irrespective of their union status, and union membership entails costs, workers will only join if they are coerced or are offered non-wage goods that they value above membership cos...

We use a quantile regression framework to investigate the degree to which work-related training affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Human capital theory suggests that the percentage returns to training investments will be the same across the conditional wage distribution. Other theories – whether based on imp...

In recent contributions, Acemoglu and Pischke argue that wage compression induces firms to invest in general training. However, they consider only absolute wage compression. We extend their approach to consider relative wage compression and argue that wage compression as generally understood in the literature is of the latter type. We show that fac...

We model educational investment, wages and employment status (full-time, part-time or non-participation) in a frictional world in which heterogeneous workers have different productivities, both at home and in the workplace. We investigate the degree to which there might be under-employment and distortions in human capital investment, and we then sh...

In this Paper, we study the role of subsidies to fertility in ensuring the political viability of unfunded social security (SS). In our model, agents are heterogeneous in age and income. Young generations confront promises made previously by older generations, and in turn choose current levels of fertility subsidies, and future levels of social sec...

It is often argued that statutory firing costs contribute to the high level of European unemployment. This paper aims to shed light on this debate by examining the employment implications of firing costs in (i) a perfectly competitive labour market with exogenously given wages, and (ii) a model where wages are endogenous and workers are assumed to...

This paper estimates models of training based on count data, in which the dependent variable takes only non-negative integer values corresponding to the number of work-related training courses occurring in the interval 1981 to 1991. The data set is the National Child Development Study. The raw data indicate substantial over-dispersion, and tests of...