Join the Economic Society of Australia and Women in Economics Network ACT for their presentation on Male and Female Competitive Behaviour. 

Recent research in experimental and behavioural economics has focused on the role that preferences - such as attitudes to risk and willingness to complete - might play in explaining economic outcomes. 

In this talk, Professor Alison Booth will draw on her recent research with co-authors that utilises data obtained from laboratory experiments as well as from the field. She will explore gender differences in willingness to compete and how these may vary across environments. 

Her examples are from diverse settings: 

• secondary school students in the UK, 
• different birth cohorts in China and Taiwan, and 
• a competitive sport in Japan that randomly assigns participants into mixed-sex and single-sex races. 

In these settings the random assignment to various groups ensures that selection is not an issue. The lecture will illustrate how the environment in which individuals are placed can affect economically important preferences and behaviour. 

Professor Alison Booth, who obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London and of the IZA Bonn. Booth was President of the European Association of Labour Economists from 2006-2008, headed the ANU's Economics Program RSSS for the period 2008-2009, and was Editor-in-chief of Labour Economics from 1999-2004. Booth has worked on a number of labour market and behavioural economics topics. Her book, The Economics of the Trade Union, Cambridge University Press (reprinted 2002) was one of Princeton University Economics Book of the Year in 1996. She has received research grants from the Australian Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Economic and Social Research Council. In 2017 Booth received the Distinguished Fellow Award from the Economic Society of Australia. 

As numbers are limited please purchase tickets online here.