About

Alison Booth holds the Brown-Forman Chair in English and is a Professor in the Department of Political & Social Thought at the University of Virginia. Her role involves engaging with the fields of political and social thought, contributing to the academic community through teaching and research. The information provided does not specify her research focus, background, or key contributions beyond her academic titles and departmental affiliation.

Research topics

• Information Retrieval
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Developmental psychology
• Literature
• Social psychology
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Art
• World Wide Web
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Wage determination and imperfect competition

  ANU Press eBooks · 2026-05-04

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 modelling the labour market. Some people would argue for this only in cases when the predictions and comparative statics of the imperfectly competitive model differ from those of the competitive model. Of course, to know this, one needs to know precisely what the predictions and comparative statics of the respective models are. Moreover, for policymakers to be able to determine if an intervention is required in the first place, there does need to be some analytical framework to act as a guide. In the perfectly competitive model of the labour markets, for example, typically no intervention or regulation would be justified. However, labour economics has moved far beyond this position, with the incorporation of new ideas into modeling wage determination in imperfectly competitive labour markets, and with the availability of better datasets to facilitate empirical investigation.

  PublisherDOI

• The free rider problem and a social custom model of trade union membership

  ANU Press eBooks · 2026-05-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The literature on public good provision by groups has traditionally emphasized the free rider problem. If it is assumed that a group forms to provide, or to lobby for the provision of, a good that is collective to potential members, then the major conceptual problem to the formation of such a group is that individuals can enjoy the benefits of group action without incurring the costs. By doing this, they free ride. In small groups the free rider problem is not generally considered insurmountable. However, the larger the number of potential beneficiaries, the more difficult it is to overcome the free rider problem, due to exclusion and surveillance difficulties, and the less likely is optimal collective good provision, or any collective good provision in the extreme. The free rider hypothesis has a long history in economic thought. As early as 1848, the free rider potential of any group of workers was perceived by J. S. Mill. However, it appears that it was not until 1965 that an attempt was made to explain why large groups providing collective goods manage to exist despite the free rider problem. Olson [1965] proposed the following explanation. If a large group exists, it must have formed either because membership is compulsory or because the group provides private goods and services accessible only to its members, with ancillary provision of the collective good as a byproduct. The literature that developed from Olson's work has focused primarily on the suboptimal provision of the collective good, the difficulties of getting members to contribute in proportion to the benefits received, and preference revelation incentives. (See for example Groves and Ledyard [1977].) However, there are problems with both of the solutions proposed by Olson to overcome the free rider problem facing large groups. First, if coercion is looked at as a solution to the free rider problem, the question arises as to how the coercion itself is financed [Guttman, 1978]. This is unlikely to be costless. The second problem concerns the byproduct solution. Private good pro-

  PublisherDOI

• Hours of work and gender identity: Does part-time work make the family happier?

  ANU Press eBooks · 2026-05-04

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Taking into account inter-dependence within the family, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and happiness.We use panel data from the new Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey.Our analysis indicates that part-time women are more satisfied with working hours than full-time women. Partnered women's life satisfaction is increased if their partners work full-time.Male partners' life satisfaction is unaffected by their partners' market hours but is increased if they themselves are working full-time.This finding is consistent with the gender identity hypothesis of Akerlof and Kranton (2000).

  PublisherDOI

• Topo-biographies of Women, "Austria," and Textual and Spatial Methods

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-06-30

  paratextOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  With evidence from Collective Biographies of Women, this paper selects examples of "Austria" to challenge assignment of nationality in women's biographies. The presentation advocates a mid-range approach to textual and spatial DH with awareness of intersectional feminist history and theory.

  PublisherDOI

• Victorian metafiction

  Nineteenth Century Contexts · 2023-08-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlison BoothALISON BOOTH, Brown-Forman Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is Faculty Director of Digital Humanities Centers in the Library. Specializing in transatlantic nineteenth-century feminist studies, she directs Collective Biographies of Women, a database emerging from her book, How to Make It as a Woman (U. Chicago, 2004). Booth’s other books include Homes and Haunts, a study of literary tourism, and a book on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. She edited Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure and the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights.

  PublisherDOI

• Mary Carpenter, Frances Power Cobbe, “Noble Workers,” and Evangelical Discourse in Action

  Victorian Literature and Culture · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Victorian activists Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) held different standing in their day: the international founder of reform schools, considered a devout “noble worker,” mentored the Theist journalist who is better known today for feminism and animal-rights organizing. The essay draws on contemporary and recent studies of both figures and the short versions collected in books in Collective Biographies of Women, a database with an XML schema annotating the narratives. Examining different treatment of Carpenter and Cobbe in varied texts, the essay especially focuses on keywords and phrases, “noble,” “worker,” “perishing and dangerous classes,” and tropes of a lady entering low or dark places. Evangelical discourse is disparaged in the current climate among academics and activists seeking health care, education, or rights for the poor, but affect and faith-based activism should not be discounted then or now.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Investigation into Fertility Awareness amongst the child-bearing population.

  PubMed · 2023-05-18

  article
  Publisher

• The direct and intergenerational behavioural consequences of a socio-political upheaval

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2022 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Social psychology
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• A Mid-Range Team of Rivals: Women Novelists in the Collective Biographies of Women Database

  Victorian Studies · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: A collaborative, interdisciplinary study (English, history) of the authors, subjects, contents, and substance of a key early collection of criticism of women novelists, tied to the Queen’s 1897 Jubilee. Famous or obscure women novelists assess the work of deceased peers, censuring most those who are now canonical. Attending to the style and orientation of particular chapters and some research in publishing history, we suggest varied textual and quantitative approaches, drawing on our database of 1,272 collective biographies of women to explore what we can discover from one book carefully contextualized, instead of distant reading in a much larger corpus.

  PublisherDOI

• A Mid-Range Team of Rivals: Women Novelists in the Collective Biographies of Women Database

  Victorian Studies · 2022-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: A collaborative, interdisciplinary study (English, history) of the authors, subjects, contents, and substance of a key early collection of criticism of women novelists, tied to the Queen’s 1897 Jubilee. Famous or obscure women novelists assess the work of deceased peers, censuring most those who are now canonical. Attending to the style and orientation of particular chapters and some research in publishing history, we suggest varied textual and quantitative approaches, drawing on our database of 1,272 collective biographies of women to explore what we can discover from one book carefully contextualized, instead of distant reading in a much larger corpus.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark L. Bryan

  85 shared

• Trev Lynn Broughton

  81 shared

• Joseph Bristow

  81 shared

• Elisha Cohn

  Cornell University

  81 shared

• Kirstie Blair

  University of Strathclyde

  81 shared

• Mary Carpenter

  81 shared

• Jesse Cordes

  University of Strathclyde

  81 shared

• Tina Young Choi

  81 shared