Job Market Paper

Intention to Teach: The Incentive Impacts of Bursaries

[Draft available here]

Teachers are an essential input of the education production function. However, amid global teacher shortages, research on policies to attract new teachers remains limited. I assess the impact of financial incentives on the recruitment and retention of trainee teachers. Using a panel of UK teachers, I exploit policy-induced variation in the bursary levels offered across years, subjects, and the trainee’s undergraduate classification. Results suggest that a £10k increase in training bursary leads to a 34% rise in trainee recruitment, and a 14% increase in the remaining teacher cohort size three years later. However, trainees are 1.8 percentage points less likely to become a teacher post-training, which is driven primarily by unobservable selection rather than observable personal characteristics. The cost of gaining 5,000 additional teaching years through raising bursaries is roughly equal to the cost through raising teacher pay. Raising training bursaries is a flexible tool to address teacher shortages that can be easily targeted at specific sub-groups, but leads to compositional effects that can impact the long-term motivation and occupation decisions of the resulting teacher workforce.

Published Works

Ethnic Minority and Migrant Pay Gaps Over the Life-Cycle [Forthcoming: Oxford Review of Economic Policy]

with Tessa Hall and Alan Manning

It is well-known that ethnic minority and migrant workers have lower average pay than the white UK-born workforce. However, we know much less about how these gaps vary over the life-cycle because of data limitations. We use new data that combines a 1999-2018 panel from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) with individual characteristics from the 2011 Census in England and Wales. We investigate pay gaps on labour market entry and differences in pay growth. We find that differences in entry pay gaps are more important than differences in pay growth. The entry pay gaps are large, though they vary across groups. The pay penalties on labour market entry can, to a considerable degree, be explained by over-representation in lower-paying firms and, within firms, in lower-paying occupations. For most groups, the pay gaps at entry seem to be largely preserved over the life cycle neither narrowing nor widening. For migrants, we find that the extra pay penalty is concentrated almost exclusively in those who arrived in the UK at later ages.

Selected Works in Progress

Brazilian Gang Networks [Multiple Projects]

with Rui Costa, Magdalena Dominguez and Matteo Sandi

Using detailed administrative data from a Brazilian state, we identify organized crime gang hierarchies through networks of co-offenders. We assess how individuals may be induced to join networks using a source of exogeneous variation from within the justice system.

Welfare and Distributional Consequences of Constrained University Admissions Under Uncertainty

with Sidharth Moktan

Local Labor Markets: The Impact of Ethnic Community Ties

with Shadi Farahzadi

Blog Posts

Ethnic Minorities and the UK labour market: Are things getting better?

Economics Observatory, with Alan Manning 7 April 2021

Comparison of disparities in pay, employment and unemployment among different ethnic groups in the UK shows that there has been little change over the past 25 years. Indeed, for black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men and women, pay gaps with white men and women have widened. Read More

Are employment opportunities for ethnic minorities in the UK really improving? Fact checking the Sewell Report

LSE Research for the World, with Alan Manning 9 November 2021

Does the UK have a problem with structural racism? The Sewell Report may have concluded that it doesn’t, but its findings are contentious, and many disagree with its outlook. Alan Manning and Rebecca Rose conducted research into the report’s conclusions on ethnic minorities and unemployment. Read More