Professor Alan Woodland

Emeritus Professor Alan Woodland FASSA

BA, PhD (New England)

Discipline: Economics

Year Elected: 1985

It is a great privilege to receive the Academy of Social Sciences Jubilee Award, and so I would like to thank the Academy very much. The award has given me the opportunity to reflect on the Academy and my career over the last 40 years.

While the Jubilee Award is partly one for my longevity, for which I am personally extremely thankful, it is also gratifying to be included among the many Jubilee Fellows who have made exceptional contributions to scholarship in the social sciences. The list includes many who were my colleagues, economists who were my mentors and peers, and others whom I previously knew or met at the Academy from other areas of the social sciences such as geography and psychology.

At the annual Academy meetings, I have always enjoyed the Cunningham Lecture, invariably given by an expert in the field and extremely informative to me about areas outside my own area of economics. I also particularly enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with Fellows I knew and to meet others. This is a very valuable feature of the Academy.

Serendipitously, I renewed my earlier acquaintance with Jubilee Fellow and psychologist, Norm Feather. I joined a social tennis group in Sydney and was surprised to see someone who I thought was Norm. Not so — he was Norm’s identical twin brother! Norm would join us for tennis en route to the annual Academy meetings. Playing against the twins in doubles was a case of seeing double! Perhaps this is not the usual way to interact with Fellows.

I became a Fellow of the Academy several years following my appointment as Professor of Econometrics at the University of Sydney. Previously, I was particularly fortunate to have twelve very formative years at the University of British Colombia, where I received invaluable mentorship from Professors Terry Wales and Erwin Diewert (now also an Academy Fellow), who became my coauthors. My PhD supervisor at the University of New England, Professor Takashi Takayama, mentored me with an appreciation for rigorous economic theory and application, and a strong work ethic.

Prior to my election to the Academy, I was undertaking research mainly in applied econometrics focusing on the estimation of labour supply functions with Terry Wales. Topics ranged from the estimation of labour supply when individuals faced progressive income taxes, to the econometric analysis of data with observations for individuals not working and missing wages, and to the joint labour supply decisions of married couples. This research culminated in a paper on the econometric estimation of the allocation of each partner’s time between leisure, paid work and housework. Not surprisingly, the latter aspect on men’s time spent doing housework was met with much mirth on the part of our wives. Joint work had also just been completed on the estimation of demand functions for goods using household survey data with zero demands.

I was also continuing research on international trade theory. Erwin Diewert and I initially worked on a very general model of the production sector of a small open economy and then proceeded to investigate various international trade policy issues during the 1980s and beyond. The purpose was to determine conditions under which reforms of international trade taxes would unambiguously benefit national households. Another co-author and I made further extensions to a world economy, establishing conditions for reforms to raise the welfare of households in every country.

The Jubilee Award, relating as it does to longevity, also seems particularly pertinent to my most recent research program on population ageing. The global importance and relevance of the issue induced my embarkation on this new research within a multi-disciplinary centre. The focus is on using dynamic general equilibrium models to analyse the welfare and inequality effects of changes to Australia’s age pension, income taxation and superannuation policies.

Of what other contributions am I most proud? I was proud to be elected as an Econometric Society Fellow in 1988 and as a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia in 2008. I am also proud of my contributions to international and Australasian economics professions through memberships of the world Council of the Econometric Society and the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. I also contributed to the formation of the Australasian Region for the Econometric Society, which I chaired for almost two decades. My editorship of The Economic Record, the national journal of the Economic Society of Australia, was a privilege and opportunity to contribute to the Australian economics community, another proud achievement.

Finally, I wish to again express my appreciation of receipt of this Jubilee Award.