I figured I would post the current draft of my dissertation. It is being evaluated by the committee members now, and so why not have everyone evaluate it! Also, since I am on the job market there is proof I am close to finished.

Here is a pdf of the draft. This draft is not guaranteed to stay the same as I find errors, but at this point changes should (hopefully) be minimal. As always I appreciate any feedback. The title is What we can learn from small units of analysis, and below is the abstract.

The dissertation is aimed at advancing knowledge of the correlates of crime at small geographic units of analysis. I begin by detailing what motivates examining crime at small places, and focus on how aggregation creates confounds that limit causal inference. Local and spatial effects are confounded when using aggregate units, so to the extent the researcher wishes to distinguish between these two types of effects it should guide what unit of analysis is chosen. To illustrate these differences, I examine local, spatial and contextual effects for bars, broken windows and crime using publicly available data from Washington, D.C.