Junior Specialist / Assistant Specialist - Economics - Department of Economics

The Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, seeks a Junior / Assistant Specialist to work with Professor Nicolas Longuet-Marx in the conduct of several of his research projects in political economy, focusing on municipal bond referendums, the innovation and diffusion of policies across states over time, the drivers of political realignment, and the interaction between labor market factors and political behavior.

Tasks will include data collection, data cleaning and processing, and data analysis. Duties will include: Collecting recent and historical data on American political economy, such as precinct results, candidate websites, municipal finance data, and campaign contributions. The data will be collected from various sources, such as Secretaries of State, county election officials, the Federal Election Commission, the U.

S. Census Bureau, and the Library of Congress. Processing the above-described datasets, together with other datasets already collected by the Principal Investigators. The processing will include geospatial analysis to recover precinct demographics and map changes in precincts over time, as well as simple natural language processing to analyze candidate websites and the automatic digitization of old electoral maps.

Analyzing the different datasets to produce descriptive statistics and data visualizations, conduct econometric analyses, and estimate structural models of political behavior and political competition.