Email
r.rose@lse.ac.uk

Office Address
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Placement Officer
Matthias Doepke

Supervisors
Steve Machin
John Van Reenen

References
Steve Machin
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
s.j.machin@lse.ac.uk

Alan Manning
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
a.manning@lse.ac.uk

John Van Reenen
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
j.vanreenen@lse.ac.uk

Download Rebecca's c.v.

Intention to Teach: The Incentive Impacts of Bursaries.
Teachers are an essential input of the education production function. However at a time of global teacher shortages, there is limited research on the effectiveness of policies designed to attract more individuals into the profession. I assess the impact of front-loaded financial incentives on the composition, 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, a £10k increase in bursary leads to negative retention outcomes. Trainees are 2.4% less likely to appear as a teacher post-training, which is driven primarily by unobservable ’motivation’ rather than observable personal characteristics. Results are primarily driven by stem trainees and are robust to controlling for an individual’s outside option wage. The cost per additional teaching year from a £10k increase in bursary level is over two times cheaper than raising teacher salaries by 2%. Raising training bursaries is a flexible tool to address teacher shortages, but leads to compositional effects that can impact the long-term motivation and occupation decisions of the resulting teacher workforce. I Link to paper.

Publications

Ethnic Minority and Migrant Pay Gaps Over the Life-Cycle, with Alan Manning and Tessa Hall. Forthcoming in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.
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.

Working Papers

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.
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.

Works in Progress

Local Labor Markets: The Impact of Ethnic Community Ties, with Shadi Farahzadi.