Hilde Behrend

Hilde Behrend (13 August 1917 – 11 January 2000) was an economist, renowned for her research into industrial relations and the motivational differences between workers.

Hilde Behrend was born on 13 August 1917 in Berlin, Germany. Her father, , was a physics and mathematics teacher and well known educationalist, who was demoted and dismissed by the Nazis, due to his Jewish heritage. Her brother, , became a mathematician.

In 1936, aged 19 years old, Behrend moved to London. She first worked as a secretary, but in 1941 she started at the London School of Economics to study economics. Here, she won the University of London's Metcalfe scholarship for women and graduated with honours in economics in 1944. After finishing her degree, she taught German and French at a grammar school, before starting work as a research assistant for Professor Sargant Florence at the University of Birmingham.

Behrend completed her PhD on 'Absence Under Full Employment' at Birmingham, before moving to the University of Edinburgh in 1954, to take up a research lectureship at the new social sciences research centre led by Professor John Macmurray. She remained at Edinburgh for the whole of her academic career.

Behrend's research focused primarily on labour and industrial relations, in particular the interrelationships between economics and psychology in understanding how people operate at work. She coined the phrase 'effort bargaining', in relation to her research into the ways in which workers relate their effort to the pay they receive. She also came up with the 'blue Monday index' which measures the difference between Monday’s and Friday’s absence rates, and how these voluntary absence varied by types of worker.

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