Teachers' Pay and Pupil Performance
If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? If teachers were better paid and higher up the national income distribution, would there be an improvement in pupil performance? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine the enormous variation in teachers' pay across OECD countries and its significance for educational outcomes.
Essays in labour economics
My thesis investigates the role of incentives for employees and the phenomenon of labour market hysteresis in driving productivity and employment in the labor market in the UK. Chapter 1 summarizes the thesis. 
The second chapter estimates the impact of introducing an explicit points-based system in favour of finding jobs for the disabled in a UK job placement agency. Using dynamic analysis, we find that in the long-run the policy improved disabled outflows by 6% and had an insignificant effect on JSA outflows. In the short-run, the policy had a negative impact on JSA outflows that declined by 2%. This is consistent with a model where information helps both groups, but incentives offset this for the able and reinforce it for the disabled. The third chapter studies how incentives are weakened in a public sector organization when rewards are based on team output rather than individual output. With the introduction of team rewards, employees are likely to free-ride on each other’s efforts. I find compelling evidence that this indeed occurs. Peer monitoring, may however, limit free-riding in teams. I formalize the impact under two benchmark models to ascertain the relative impact of peer monitoring and free-riding. Using difference-in-differences estimators, I find that consistent with a degree of peer monitoring, the dilution effect is smaller when peer monitoring is easier. The fourth chapter models the phenomenon of labor market hysteresis in a macroeconomic model to determine its impact on macroeconomic outcomes. In particular, we study its role in determining the impact of the scale and timing of UK’s fiscal consolidation programme on output and 
unemployment in the UK. Finally, the last chapter studies employee incentives in the context of education. Motivated by a diagnosis of increasing inequality in UK’s 
educational attainment in secondary education, we recommend a flexible school system and improved school and teacher governance.
The Intuitive Physics of the Equilibrium of the Lever and of the Hydraulic Pressures: Implications for the Teaching of Elementary Physics.
The research field of intuitive physics focuses on discrepancies between 
theoretical and intuitive physical knowledge. Consideration of these 
discrepancies can help in the teaching of elementary physics. However, 
evidence shows that theoretical and intuitive physical knowledge may also 
be congruent. Physics teaching could further benefit from understanding the 
reasons for this congruence. The present study explored these reasons by 
investigating the intuitive physics of the equilibrium of the lever and of the 
hydraulic pressures. It was found that the intuitive-physics law of the lever 
was multiplicative for all participants while the intuitive-physics law of the 
hydraulic pressures differed among participants. Since these laws are 
equally simple and the layman probably has had extensive experience with 
the lever and scarce or no experience with the hydraulic lift, these findings 
support the general hypothesis that physical laws and corresponding 
intuitive-physics laws are congruent when people have had experience with 
the respective phenomena. The results and theoretical considerations suggest 
two strategic principles for teaching elementary physics.