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Popular approaches to building data from unstructured text come with limitations, such as scalability, interpretability, replicability, and real-world applicability. These can be overcome with Context Rule Assisted Machine Learning (CRAML), a method and no-code suite of software tools that builds structured, labeled datasets which are accurate and reproducible. CRAML enables domain experts to access uncommon constructs within a document corpus in a low-resource, transparent, and flexible manner. CRAML produces document-level datasets for quantitative research and makes qualitative classification schemes scalable over large volumes of text. We demonstrate that the method is useful for bibliographic analysis, transparent analysis of proprietary data, and expert classification of any documents with any scheme. To demonstrate this process for building data from text with Machine Learning, we publish open-source resources: the software, a new public document corpus, and a replicable analysis to build an interpretable classifier of suspected "no poach" clauses in franchise documents.

The teleworkability of jobs - whether they can and will be performed remotely - has been increasingly contested in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. To explain which jobs are teleworkable and why, we emphasize the institutional context of a job, including differences among firms, union representation, professional licensing requirements, sector, and employment models. Using a novel dataset of job characteristics extracted from the text of a large sample of online job advertisements from 2010-2021, we examine various explanations for change in the availability of remote job opportunities. Prior to the pandemic, private sector, non-union, and unlicensed jobs lagged federal government, union, and licensed jobs in the growth of telework. Firms are the largest source of variance in remote job offerings relative to other obvious alternatives (technological feasibility, occupation, sector, geography). After March 2020, between-firm differences increased, and institutions influenced the rate of telework adoption.

Information and communication technology (ICT) challenges traditional assumptions about the capacity to manage workers beyond organizational and physical boundaries. A typology connects a variety of non-traditional work organizations made possible by ICT, including offshoring, outsourcing, remote work, virtual companies, and platforms. A model illustrates how new technology serves as a proximate cause for a revision of social contracts between capital, labor and government reached through bargaining, and how external shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the institutional environment, and limitations in practice influence how technology changes the organization of work. An historical case illustrates the general features of the model, and a review of the outsourcing and offshoring literature provides instructive examples of how features of the model will potentially influence the future of post-pandemic remote work.

This study explores what determines employers' violations of the wage contracts of workers on H-1B temporary work visas, which occur when firms pay those workers below the promised prevailing or "market" wage. A theoretical framework is proposed that predicts more violations during economic downturns, fewer violations when firms have more labor-market power, and more violations by subcontractor firms. Empirical analysis is based on a firm-level matched dataset of wage and hour violations and the firms that sponsor H-1Bs. Higher labor market power, measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, is associated with fewer violations. Higher unemployment rates and subcontractor firms are associated with more violations. The effects of the unemployment rate and labor market power are amplified in subcontractor firms.

The globalization of knowledge work includes the physical migration of millions of skilled guest workers. In three essays on this theme, administrative and payroll records are studied to appreciate the scope and consequences of this activity. In the first essay, the large organizational sponsors of skilled guest workers are identified and an analysis is performed on their guest worker sponsoring activities. A positive relationship between guest worker sponsorship and innovation is supported, although increases in guest workers that change the composition of an organization's workforce are linked with labor arbitrage. In the second essay, payroll records from five organizations that sponsor skilled guest workers are analyzed to discern whether institutional barriers to labor mobility restrict the freedom of these workers to switch jobs. While claims of indentured servitude are not supported, the labor market for guest workers is heavily influenced by macroeconomic events. In the third essay, interviews and an analysis of occupations suggest that a framework that separates skill and wage dimensions might better predict the offshoring of skilled knowledge work.

Supplemental Material, Appendix_A_Figures for Monopsony Power and Guest Worker Programs by Eric M. Gibbons, Allie Greenman, Peter Norlander and Todd Sørensen in The Antitrust Bulletin

The growing divergence in U.S. employee relations is described through a review of national and state-level changes to employment protection laws. Major employment laws are reviewed, as are the significant exceptions to the laws, and exemptions to the exceptions. Major regulatory actions, as well as reversals of the regulations, and reversals of the reversals are also described. An analysis of changes to state employment policies since 2000 shows an increasing ideologically driven divergence within the country between left-leaning “equity and voice” states and right-leaning “individual rights and efficiency” states. Instability and divergence are major features of the U.S. system of employee relations that require additional scrutiny.

Guest workers on visas in the United States may be unable to quit bad employers due to barriers to mobility and a lack of labor market competition. Using H-1B, H-2A, and H-2B program data, we calculate the concentration of employers in geographically defined labor markets within occupations. We find that many guest workers face moderately or highly concentrated labor markets, based on federal merger scrutiny guidelines, and that concentration generally decreases wages. For example, moving from a market with an HHI of zero to a market comprised of two employers lowers H-1B worker wages approximately 10 percent, and a pure monopsony (one employer) reduces wages by 13 percent. A simulation shows that wages under pure monopsony could be 47 percent lower, suggesting that employers do not use the extent of their monopsony power. Enforcing wage regulations and decreasing barriers to mobility may better address issues of exploitation than antitrust scrutiny.

In Sweden, the subject of history has become more comprehensive and diverse in recent decades. Parallel to this development, a new media landscape has been established, both in society at large and in school. Today there is a wide variety of teaching materials available, such as documentaries, news media, digitalized source material, music, computer games, encyclopedias, popular scientific articles, etc. This raises questions about which types of media history teachers use to teach their subject. The aim of this study is to analyze how teachers approach and relate to the qualities and usability of different media for teaching and learning history in upper secondary school. Semi-structured interviews are used to obtain detailed accounts of how teachers view their media use. Methodologically, the study examines teaching materials in a practice-oriented research tradition, focusing on the perceptions and uses of various media. Media ecology and sociocultural theory serve as the theoretical basis of the study. In brief, these theoretical perspectives claim that media should not be seen as neutral and value-free channels for conveying information, because intermediary media can both form and affect the learning that comes through the use of a certain medium. The concept of affordance is used in order to highlight and analyze how teachers view the effects that various types of media might have on how students understand history. This study shows that history teaching in upper secondary school is conducted in a media-rich environment. Based on the categorizations used, the eleven teachers who participated in this study report that they use a total of eighteen different types of media, and this complements and nuances the image of history teaching as a textbook-driven activity. This study also shows diversity in the teachers’ media repertoires. To explain this variation and to show the considerations underlying teachers’ media use, the term mediation strategies is used. The use of this concept shows that teachers’ perceptions of the usability of various media depend on how they perceive the qualities of these various media, as well as how the teachers relate both to the subject of history and to the pupils. Based on previous research and the results of the present study, it is concluded that it is advisable to advocate an extensive and varied media use when teaching history. Furthermore, it is highlighted that there is a need for a thorough discussion regarding which types of media should be part of history teachers’ media repertoires and what kind of mediation competence history teachers require today.

Critics of the H-1B program for high-skilled workers argue that the program restricts immigrant job mobility and lacks a vehicle for adjusting the number of visas during a recession. We study the job mobility of highly-skilled Indian IT guest workers and provide new evidence on their inter-firm mobility and return migration patterns. We use a unique multi-year firm level dataset to show that, outside of the Great Recession, these workers are mobile and that lower paid guest workers are more likely than higher paid guest workers to separate to another firm in the U.S. We also analyze return migration decisions and find that low wage workers repatriate more than high wage workers, and that this relationship intensified during the Great Recession. This partially mitigates concerns that guest worker visa programs do not adjust to fluctuations in the macro economy. Following this finding, we show that the employment to population ratio (EPOP) for highly-skilled male workers has fallen at a much steeper rate since 2008 than is typically recognized, once we account for the phenomenon of discouraged immigrants.