My father, Peter Riach, who has died aged 86, was professor and head of the economics division at De Montfort College, Leicester, from 1987 to 2000. He was additionally a passionate advocate for equality within the labour market, initially on girls’s rights after which on all types of discrimination, together with that primarily based on race and age. His educational analysis to uncover such discrimination was broadly appreciated.
A profoundly Keynesian economist, it was important to Peter that, having returned completely to central London from his native Australia within the Eighties, he lived solely streets away from the previous residence of the economist John Maynard Keynes and different members of the Bloomsbury set who so impressed his convictions.
Born in Melbourne, to Andrew Riach, a grocer initially from Glasgow, and Doris, a dressmaker, Peter was additionally a proficient athlete at Melbourne highschool, and at Melbourne College, the place he graduated in economics in 1958. There he met Lorraine, a fellow scholar who turned a trainer and lecturer, they usually married in 1960.
Peter first travelled to London in 1962 to check for his PhD at London Faculty of Economics beneath the supervision of Henry Phelps Brown. He returned to Melbourne in 1965 to discovered the labour economics division at Monash College.
Through the 70s his analysis contributed to the speculation of earnings distribution, complementing the work of the Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor.
Within the 80s, along with his colleague Judith Wealthy, Peter pioneered the applying of the experimental technique to the labour market, sending out purposes to actual jobs however various gender, race or age of the in any other case equally certified and skilled candidates. The parallel purposes led to very totally different charges of invitation to interview, suggesting discrimination.
Peter lived in London commonly on analysis sabbaticals, staying in Bloomsbury, however settled in Britain lastly along with his household in 1987 with the intention to discovered the economics division at De Montfort College. In 1997 he co-edited with Geoffrey Harcourt A ‘Second Version’ of the Basic Idea, a sequel to Keynes’s main 1936 work.
Through the Covid-19 lockdowns, Peter wrote and self-published a novel, Re-Imagining the Christmas Truce, an “different historical past” set in the course of the 1914 first world battle truce, wherein well-known feminists reminiscent of Emmeline Pankhurst set up peace in Europe.
After retiring in 2000, Peter was a marketing consultant for the Jail Service Pay Evaluation Physique (2004-09), and from 2006 was a analysis fellow on the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA), in Bonn, Germany. The identical 12 months he appeared on a Panorama programme to debate his analysis on age discrimination.
Peter and Lorraine loved travelling to Spain and France, specifically the countryside round Aix-en-Provence to have a good time their love of the work of Cézanne, and commonly attending the ballet on the Royal Opera Home in Covent Backyard.
Lorraine died in 2006. Peter is survived by me.
