Merrilyn Groom is a senior analyst at RAND. Working primarily for RAND Europe, she specialises in education and labour markets. Groom is an economist by training, having completed her doctorate in economics at the University of Oxford. She leads and manages evaluations across the education and employment portfolios, with topic expertise in education (particularly early years and primary), economic decision-making of children and adolescents, youth transitions from education into the labour market, and gender inequality. As a quantitative researcher, she has methodological expertise in randomised controlled trials (RCTs), quasi-experimental design (QED), survey analysis and econometrics. Groom has a wide portfolio of projects, having managed several education trials for the Education Endowment Foundation across all levels of education (early years, primary school and secondary school), led the design of an early years workforce survey for the OECD, worked on modelling youth transitions into the labour market for the Youth Futures Foundation, and conducted an analysis of gender equality in financial independence across the EU for the European Institute of Gender Equality.
Groom previously worked as a teaching fellow and a lecturer/tutor at the University of Oxford (teaching public economics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and maths for economics). Prior to relocating to the UK to undertake her masters and doctorate at Oxford, Groom worked as an analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia.
D.Phil. in economics, University of Oxford; M.Phil. in economics, University of Oxford; B.Ec. (Hons) in econometrics and economics, University of New South Wales
