UC EVENTS

BGL's next Professorial Lecture is scheduled for October 3 (1A21, 4-6 pm). Professor Xiaodong Gong will be speaking on the topic of "Longevity of marital relationships and problem gambling in Australia". 

The marital relationship plays a central role in our society. Its stability affects the wellbeing of individuals and has profound implications for the society. In this talk, I will shed some light on some of the important determining factors of marriage longevity including personality traits, (non-)cognitive skills, and addictive behaviour by the partners such as problem gambling. I will show that, among other things, individuals’ noncognitive skills are important for such relationships to sustain. But more importantly, compatibility in the noncognitive skills, personality, and the characteristics of the couples such as ethnicity, education, and age can significantly affect the duration of relationships. This may be because more compatible couples could achieve higher productivities in household production, higher utility from household production, or bear lower management costs of maintaining marital relationships. In addition, I will show how individuals’ gambling behaviours are affected by their (non-)cognitive skills, before quantifying the detrimental effects of partner’s problem gambling behaviour on their marital relationships.

Xiaodong Gong is a professor at Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society of University of Canberra BGL. Prior to joining the University of Canberra, Xiaodong worked at the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Germany, The Australian National University, and the Australian Treasury. He is a Fellow of the IZA. His research interests are on modelling individual and household socio-economic behaviours including labour supply, tax and transfer policy, childcare, labour mobility, child development and education, household consumption, gambling behaviour, and so on. His work has been published in reputable journals such as Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and the Economic Record.