Job Market Paper

Intention to Teach: The Incentive Impacts of Bursaries

I assess the impact of front-loaded financial incentives on the selection, recruitment, and retention of trainee teachers. Using a panel of the UK school workforce, I exploit variation in the bursary levels offered across years, subjects, and the trainee’s undergraduate classification. Results suggest that a £1,000 uplift in training bursary leads to a 2.9% increase in trainee recruitment, and a 1.5% increase in the cohort size 3 years later. However, a £1,000 increase in bursary leads to negative selection in terms of retention. Trainees are 0.85% less likely to appear as a teacher post-training, which is driven by ‘unobservables’ rather than observable personal characteristics. Results are primarily driven by STEM trainees and I explore how these inentives interact with outside options to generate these findings. A bursary uplift also reduces the share of non-white stem trainees by 0.67%. Raising training bursaries offers a short-term targeted solution to teacher shortages but leads to long term changes in teacher motivation and diversity within the classroom.

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 Magdalena Dominguez, Matteo Sandi and Rui Costa

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

We study the impact of uncertainty and information constraints on undergraduate admissions in the UK on students’ application decisions and the quality of student-course matches. We exploit the fact that the admissions procedure has both a centralised application mechanism that limits the number of applications, and decentralised decision making with heterogeneous and holistic selection criteria which increases uncertainty. By designing a structural choice model that allows heterogeneity in both preferences and risk aversion, we will disentangle the impacts of preferences versus risk aversion and information constraints in the admission outcomes of students – paying particular attention to how social mobility for different socioeconomic groups are impacted.

Local Labor Markets: The Impact of Ethnic Community Ties

with Shadi Farahzadi

Monte et al. (2018) shows that the impact of a labor demand shock on local employment varies according to the level of commuting/moving openness in the local labor market. Various ethnic groups exhibit different levels of willingness to relocate, influenced by their cultural values and community ties. The gender and ethnic variations in willingness to relocate can significantly influence how labor market shocks impact individuals. By examining the regional variations in labor demand market shocks, we can determine how these shocks affect ethnic minorities differently due to their limited inclination to relocate. The dataset used for this study is the ASHE - Census 2011 linked dataset from the UK, offering comprehensive work job and individual characteristics.

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