Essays on crime and education

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