This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring education and crime in the modern economy. The first two chapters focus on inter-district school choice and teacher labor markets in Massachusetts. The third chapter examines the demolition of public housing in Chicago and its interaction with the geospatial distribution of gang territory. In the first chapter, I study the sorting of students to school districts using new lottery data from an inter-district school choice program. I find that moving to a more preferred school district generates benefits to student test scores, coursework quality, high-school graduation, and college attendance. Motivated by these findings, I develop a rich model of treatment effect heterogeneity and estimate it using a new empirical-Bayes-type procedure that leverages non-experimental data to increase precision in quasi-experimental designs. I use the heterogeneous effects to show that nearly all the test score gains from the choice program emerge from Roy selection. In the second chapter (joint with Scott Imberman and Marcus Winters), we describe the relationship between school quality, teacher value-added, and teacher attrition across the public and charter sectors. We begin by documenting important differences in the sources of variation that explain attrition across sectors. Next we demonstrate that while charters are in fact more likely to remove their worst teachers, they are also more likely to lose their best. We conclude by exploring the type and quality of destination schools among teachers who move. In the third chapter, I study the demolition of 22,000 units of public housing on crime in Chicago. Point estimates that incorporate both the direct and spillover effects indicate that in the short run, the average demolition increased city-wide crime by 0.5% per month relative to baseline, with no evidence of offsetting long run reductions. I also provide evidence that spillovers are mediated by demolition-induced migration across gang territorial boundaries. I reconcile my findings with contradictory results from the existing literature by proposing and applying a test for control group contamination. I find that existing results are likely biased by previously unaccounted for spillovers.

This essay study the impact of the increased immigration to Sweden caused by the refugee crisis in 2015. With the focus on how the increased number of immigrants affects the employment rate, empirical evidence can be found that contributes to this widely discussed subject. The analysis is made by observing the share of immigrants and the employment rate in each of the 290 municipalities during the years 2014 to 2018.An empirical analysis is conducted by using a combination of a pooled OLS model along with fixed effects model. The result of the pooled OLS model indicate on a negative relationship. This could potentially be explained by the fact that immigrants generally are drawn to regions where those with similar ethnic background already live. Due to technical reasons connected to this model, fixed effects are added. Contradicting the initial results, the relationship is now expected to be positive. An increased share of immigrants by 1 percent unit is expected to increase the employment rate by 0,49 percent. However, when control variables that take the characteristics of each municipalities into consideration is introduced, the impact of the share of immigrants drops significantly. The result found that an increased share of immigrants by 1 percent unit is expected to increase the employment rate by 0,11 percent. Even though the potential presence of correlation rather than causation, and the strong impact of the control variables, it can be stated that there is a positive relationship between the increased number of immigrants in the workforce and the employment rates within the Swedish municipalities. The findings in this paper will function as a reference point that proves both the public debate and policy makers with crucial information of the expected outcome on the labor market connected to immigration.

This essay study the impact of the increased immigration to Sweden caused by the refugee crisis in 2015. With the focus on how the increased number of immigrants affects the employment rate, empirical evidence can be found that contributes to this widely discussed subject. The analysis is made by observing the share of immigrants and the employment rate in each of the 290 municipalities during the years 2014 to 2018.  An empirical analysis is conducted by using a combination of a pooled OLS model along with fixed effects model. The result of the pooled OLS model indicate on a negative relationship. This could potentially be explained by the fact that immigrants generally are drawn to regions where those with similar ethnic background already live. Due to technical reasons connected to this model, fixed effects are added. Contradicting the initial results, the relationship is now expected to be positive. An increased share of immigrants by 1 percent unit is expected to increase the employment rate by 0,49 percent. However, when control variables that take the characteristics of each municipalities into consideration is introduced, the impact of the share of immigrants drops significantly. The result found that an increased share of immigrants by 1 percent unit is expected to increase the employment rate by 0,11 percent. Even though the potential presence of correlation rather than causation, and the strong impact of the control variables, it can be stated that there is a positive relationship between the increased number of immigrants in the workforce and the employment rates within the Swedish municipalities.  The findings in this paper will function as a reference point that proves both the public debate and policy makers with crucial information of the expected outcome on the labor market connected to immigration.

Annual turnover for hourly employees in the hospitality industry averages 102%. The costs associated with hiring and training new employees are estimated at 150% of an employee's salary for businesses with more than 30 employees. The purpose of this case study was to examine the personnel selection strategies used in the casual dining sector. The sample for this study was 6 casual dining restaurant managers in the central Georgia area. Three of the participants used online selection strategies and 3 participants used intuition-based strategies. The objective of this study was to compare the similarities and differences between each respective personnel selection strategy. The conceptual framework employed is a resource-based view of the firm. Data were collected through semi structured face-to-face interviews. Data analysis occurred through coding and theming and revealed common themes between both groups. These themes were related to assessment of the application, applicant experience, applicant skills, traits, and abilities (online), and interviewing of the applicant. By implementing the recommendations from this study, managers in casual dining restaurants could affect social change whereby selecting employees who fit the restaurant environment and would demonstrate a higher self-efficacy and a better work-life balance. Promoting traits of self-efficacy and work-life balance would also create retention among hourly employees, saving restaurant organizations millions of dollars.

This research project has developed out of the desire to empirically test and evaluate the technique of shift/share analysis as applied to employment forecasting. Shifts in economic growth and more recently, the fast growth patterns on the West Coast have required the development of analytical techniques to forecast regional employment growth. Several methodologies have been applied to this problem including: regression analysis and trend extrapolation, economic base studies, and shift/share analysis.

Recent advances in machine learning offer social scientists a unique opportunity to use data-driven methods to uncover insights into human behavior. However, current machine learning methods are opaque, ineffective on small social science datasets, and tailored for predicting unseen values rather than estimating parameters from data. In this thesis, we develop interpretable machine learning techniques designed to uncover latent patterns and estimate critical quantities in the social sciences. We focus on two aspects of interpretability: explaining individual model predictions and discovering latent patterns from data. We describe a method for explaining the predictions of general, black-box sequence models. This method approximates a combinatorial objective to elucidate the decision-making processes of sequence models. Next, we narrow our focus to domain-specific applications. In political science, we develop the text-based ideal point model, a model that quantifies political positions from text. This model marries a classical idea from political science with a Bayesian matrix factorization technique to infer meaningful structure from text. In labor economics, we adapt a model from natural language processing to analyze career trajectories. We describe a transfer learning method that can overcome the constraints posed by small survey datasets. Finally, we adapt this predictive model to estimate an important quantity in labor economics: the history-adjusted gender wage gap.

For several decades, the subject of immigrants and the integration of them has been a highly debated subject, both in politics and research. As the number of immigrants only seems to increase, the relevance of economic assimilation does aswell. The existing research within this field largely focuses on immigrants’ wage development while less attention is paid to their employment levels, implying that there are gaps in the literature. This thesis aims to contribute to filling the gap by examining how the role of governmental spending on labor market programs affects the employment rate amongst immigrants as a proxy for economic assimilation. This paper utilizes a panel data that observes 28 OECD member countries between the years 2004–2018. All the observations are obtained from the OECD Statistics database. The panel data is applied to a fixed effects linear Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model. While the hypothesis in this paper suggests that economic assimilation is promoted by increased LMP spending, the results indicated on the opposite; increased LMP spending seems to decrease immigrant employment rate by 2.4% and thus not promoting economic assimilation of immigrants. Though uncertain, this effect seems to weaken considering time lags.

This research examines the social construction of a Virginia Indian reservation community during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Between 1824 and 1877 the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway divided their reservation lands into individual partible allotments and developed family farm ventures that mirrored their landholding White neighbors. In Southampton's slave-based society, labor relationships with White landowners and "Free People of Color" impacted Nottoway exogamy and shaped community notions of peoplehood. Through property ownership and a variety of labor practices, Nottoway's kin-based farms produced agricultural crops, orchard goods and hogs for export and sale in an emerging agro-industrial economy. However, shifts in Nottoway subsistence, land tenure and marriage practices undermined their matrilineal social organization, descent reckoning and community solidarity. With the asymmetrical processes of kin-group incorporation into a capitalist economy, questions emerge about the ways in which the Nottoway resituated themselves as a social group during the allotment process and after the devastation of the Civil War. Using an historical approach emphasizing world-systems theory, this dissertation investigates the transformation of the Nottoway community through an exploration and analysis of their nineteenth-century political economy and notions of peoplehood.

In 2018, the Orlando metro area was visited by 126.1 million tourists, a new record which the area has broken for its eighth year (Sanata 2019). As the number of visitors to the area continues to rise, so has the number of people employed by the hospitality industry which currently makes up the largest sector of the area's job market, employing 280,000 workers as of December 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Consistent growth in various insecure and unstable jobs of this kind have prompted the development of theory regarding the emergence of a new class known as the precariat. The precariat is largely defined by flexible labor which often leads to unstable employment and wage insecurity. Recently, business closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have led to historic levels of unemployment nationwide, disproportionately affecting those employed in the hospitality industry and further exacerbating the instability and uncertainty that characterizes precarious work. The purpose of this study is to explore and evaluate the experiences of hospitality workers since business closures and to identify how race, gender, and income type may create stratification within the precariat. Data was collected from 254 participants using a 10-minute online survey based on the following dimensions: employment status, housing, healthcare, food security, access to and receipt of social services, and opinions regarding employer interactions and government relief. The results of this study identify the difficulties in maintaining household expenses and obtaining unemployment benefits during the pandemic as well as negative opinions regarding state and federal government response. Furthermore, analysis of race, gender, and income type within the precariat found significant differences between the overall wellbeing of women and men as well as among varying income types including salaried, tipped, and hourly workers.

The promise of democracy, as an Enlightenment ideal, has been to specifically transcend the dichotomy of ruler and ruled by establishing self-rule of the people themselves as the normative basis of governance in the modern world. Reproduction of societies and the socioeconomic form this takes along with associated ideological constructs which legitimize such formations, however, have produced various understandings of just exactly what is meant by democracy as well pitting one conception against another. The Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (1945–1991) brought the question of democracy to the forefront of modern political debate, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet model on December 25, 1991 has motivated the U.S. to place its own capitalist democracy forward as a model to be exported abroad through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and emulated throughout the world. The present study examines this democracy-promotion project of the U.S. through the NED, exploring the various contradictory tensions which this form of democracy produces in the context of an increasingly capitalist globalization of the world that has accelerated in the post-Cold War period and into the 21st century.