Essays in applied labour economics

This thesis consists of four main chapters that focus on the themes of occupational choice, wage gaps, and networks. Chapter 1 assesses 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. Larger bursaries increase both trainee recruitment and teacher cohort size three years post-training. However, the probability of becoming a teacher post-training also falls, which is driven by unobservable selection. Chapter 2 explores the heterogeneity of teacher wage gaps in England. I assess the comparability of teacher wages across sources and explore the robustness of estimated wage gaps for state-funded school teachers. I find substantial variation in wage gaps depending on the data, method, and counterfactual used, in addition to geographic inequality in teacher wage competitiveness. Chapter 3 describes how ethnic and migrant wage gaps vary across the life cycle. By exploiting newly linked UK administrative panel data, we estimate pay gaps on labour market entry and differences in pay growth. We find that the entry pay gaps are large, though they vary between groups. For most groups, pay gaps are largely preserved over the life cycle. For migrants, we find that the extra pay penalty is concentrated in those who arrived in the UK at a later age. Chapter 4 studies gangs in Brazil, an underexplored yet pervasive and volatile setting in organised crime. Using highly detailed information from intelligence, occurrence data, and prison records, we construct a network of gang affiliation and detect gang clusters using Markov stability analysis. We analyse the identified clusters through different network statistics and find a strong correlation between most individual centrality measures, while intercentrality highlights that some “key players” may have been missed in official hierarchical classifications.