Focusing on the period 1566-1656, this original and lively study sheds new light on the daily lives and material culture of ordinary prostitutes and their clients in Rome after the Counter-Reformation. Tessa Storey uses a range of archival sources, including criminal records, letters, courtroom testimonies, images and popular and elite literature, to reveal issues of especial concern to contemporaries. In particular, she explores how and why women became prostitutes, the relationships between prostitutes and clients, and the wealth which potentially could be accumulated. Notarial documents provide a unique perspective on the economics and material culture of prostitution, showing what could be earned and how prostitutes dressed and furnished their homes. The book challenges traditional assumptions about the success of post-Tridentine reforms on Roman prostitution, revealing that despite energetic attempts at social disciplining by the Counter-Reformation Popes, prostitution continued to flourish, and to provide a lucrative living for many women.

Skill content varies enormously across industries and overtime. This paper showsthat in addition to di erences in capital-to-labor ratios, di erences in import competitioncan explain an economically and statistically signi cant portion of the variations ofvarious skill measures across the manufacturing industries. Speci cally, industries facingmore intense import competition employ more non-routine sets of skills, includingcognitive, interpersonal and manual skills, and less cognitive routine skills. In addition,we nd that the impact of import competition on skills is not speci c to imports fromlow-wage countries or from Chinese imports. A number of robustness checks suggestthat the results are unlikely to be driven by econometric problems.

This article discusses graduate education in geographically-integrated history as developed by the History Department of Idaho State University for its M.A. in Historical Resources Management. This Masters program is based the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and related information technologies. In addition to discussing the rationale and design of the program, the article illustrates what is involved in graduate education of this type through a description of the authors introductory graduate course Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies.

This paper explores testable implications of a simple model of spatial heterogeneity in earnings, a model in which this spatial heterogeneity arises both from differences in the places that people work and differences among people themselves. Using micro data from four waves of the Brazilian Census (from 1970 to 2000), we estimate a place premium of between 20% and 80% of wages after controlling for observable and unobservable differences between migrants and non migrants. We derive testable implications of three different potential causes of this relationship: causation of earnings by location, migrant selection, and externalities on non migrants. A range of evidence is incompatible with the notion that selection or externalities are principal determinants of the movement‐earnings relationship. This suggests that even within country's borders, very large productivity differences may arise and be persistent over time.

The West Michigan region faces two possible futures. If it continues on its current path, we forecast that the region will grow at a 0.4 percent annual rate during the next 15 years, generating 38,000 more jobs in 2025 than existed in 2010. While this forecast is an improvement over historical trends, it is well below the expected 0.9 percent average annual rate of employment growth currently forecast for the nation. If the region simply grew at the national rate—in other words, if it were ―average‖—it would gain 61,000 jobs by 2025.

Three independent research papers, all broadly focused on urban and transportation economics comprise the chapters of this dissertation. These empirical papers address a variety of policy oriented issues surrounding the automobile. Although related in theme, the objective, scope, and empirical strategy of each paper differs. The first chapter, “Does traffic congestion reduce employment growth?”, examines the impact of traffic congestion on employment growth in large U.S. metropolitan areas. I use an historic highway plan and political variables to serve as instruments for endogenous congestion. The results show that high initial levels of congestion dampen subsequent employment growth. This finding suggests that increasing the efficiency of public infrastructure can spur local economies. A set of counterfactual estimates show that the employment-growth returns from modest capacity expansion or congestion pricing are substantial. The second chapter, “Induced demand and rebound effects in road transport” (with Kenneth Small and Kurt Van Dender) uses a simultaneous equations model and aggregate data to estimate how drivers’ respond to exogenous increases in vehicle fuel-efficiency. One consequence of efficiency improvements is an increase vehicle use, which can moderate fuel savings. Accurate measures of this so-called ‘rebound effect’, are of interest to policy makers assessing the effectiveness of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy stadards. This research paper also measures how traffic congestion and highway infrastructure affect vehicle use. The third chapter, “Evaluating the effectiveness of metered parking policy: evidence from a quasi-experiment”, uses a unique observational data set to assess metered parking policy. Although metered parking is ubiquitous, we know little about its effectiveness, particularly its impact on the retailers it is designed to assist. Sharp twice-daily changes in parking meter enforcement allow me to compare shopping behavior in both free and metered parking environments. Using the regression discontinuity design, I find that parking fees can have large impacts on nearby commerce.

There are large differences in the employment to population ratio relative to the US across the OECD countries, and these differences are even larger for the old age (55-69 years). There are also large differences in various features of social security, such as the replacement rate, theentitlement age or whether it is allowed to collect social security while working. These observations suggest that they might be an important contributing factor in accounting for differences in retirement. I assess quantitatively the importance of these features using a life cycle generalequilibrium model of retirement. I find that the differences in social security account for 90% of the differences in employment to population ratio at ages 60-64 in the OECD. The differences in the replacement rates and whether the system allows for collecting social security while working are the most important contributing factors to account for the differences in retirement.

Privacy in data publishing has received much attention recently. The key to defining privacy is to model knowledge of the attacker -- if the attacker is assumed to know too little, the published data can be easily attacked, if the attacker is assumed to know too much, the published data has little utility. Previous work considered either quite ignorant adversaries or nearly omniscient adversaries.In this paper, we introduce a new class of adversaries that we call realistic adversaries who live in the unexplored space in between. Realistic adversaries have knowledge from external sources with an associated stubbornness indicating the strength of their knowledge. We then introduce a novel privacy framework called epsilon-privacy that allows us to guard against realistic adversaries. We also show that prior privacy definitions are instantiations of our framework. In a thorough experimental study with real census data we show that e-privacy allows us to publish data with high utility while defending against strong adversaries.

The study of welfare participation in the U.S. prior to the 1996 welfare reform act and evenafterward has focused on comparisons between native born and immigrant households.Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisonsacross race or with particular focus on particular groups like Hispanic immigrants. To the bestof our knowledge, there is no study yet that tests for difference in welfare usage amongimmigrant groups and immigrant status. We do not expect welfare usage to differ amongimmigrant groups if we control for the factors that should predict welfare usage. Similarly, ifimmigration status does not prevent welfare usage for certain immigrants, then ceterisparibus, we do not expect welfare usage to differ among immigrant based on status. Weinvestigate these possibilities by testing three related hypothesis using probability models.Our results suggest that birth place matters and the probability of welfare usage is not thesame for all groups. We also find that for some birthplace groups, citizen and non-citizensdiffer with respect to welfare usage. Finally, we find that post welfare reform, the probability ofbeing on welfare in comparison to U.S. born increased for all immigrant groups and theseincreases differed across groups. We provide possible explanations for our unexpected results

During the period 1960-2000, the proportion of two-earner couples among married couples in the U.S. more than doubled, while tax laws underwent numerous changes, with major reforms taking place in the 1980's (flattening of the federal income tax schedule) and in the 1990's (major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)). We investigate the impact of the actual tax reforms on married couples' participation through a model of heterogeneous households. Theoretically, we elucidate what aspects of the tax reforms are important for a family time allocation choice when the work choice is discrete. Quantitatively, we show that even in the 1980's, changes in tax laws account for only 8% of the increase in the proportion of two-earner couples, although this small average impact masks a much larger impact experienced by women with high earning husbands. Another important finding is that the Earned Income Tax Credit substantially discourages work participation among married couples with low-earning husbands. A notable contribution of this work is the accurate incorporation of the complex U.S. tax code into a model of heterogeneous households, which is done using TAXSIM, a tax calculator software.

The underrepresentation of blacks in the healthcare professions may havedirect implications for the health outcomes of minority patients, underscoringthe importance of understanding movement through the educationalpipeline into professional healthcare careers by race. We jointly model individualspostsecondary decisions including enrollment, college type, degreecompletion, and choosing a healthcare occupation requiring an advanceddegree. We estimate the parameters of the model with maximumlikelihood using data from the NLS-72. Our results emphasize the importanceof pre-collegiate factors and of jointly examining the full chain ofeducational decisions in understanding the sources of racial disparities inprofessional healthcare occupations.

Immigrants have figured prominently in US economic growth for decades, but the current recession has hit them hard. Between the early 1990s and 2007, the United States experienced a long period of sustained economic growth interrupted only by the relatively mild 2001 recession. During that period, immigrants surpassed natives in several key labor market outcomes. From 1994 to 2007, the immigrant employment rate rose above that of natives, peaking at about 66 percent in 2007 compared to about 63 percent for natives. Also, the immigrant unemployment rate fell below that of natives, dropping to 3.4 percent in 2006 compared to 4.5 percent for natives. These gains by immigrants are even more notable because the foreign-born population swelled during this period. Although immigrants made large inroads in the labor market, the immigrant-native earnings gap remained largely unchanged. Immigrant earnings increased, particularly during the 1990s, but the growth largely matched native earnings gains. The immigrant poverty rate plummeted during the 1990s and then remained fairly stable until the onset of the recent recession in late 2007. Immigrant economic outcomes began deteriorating before the recession was officially underway, largely as a result of the housing bust. As house prices began to decline in spring 2006, residential construction employment slumped and immigrant employment rates fell. The immigrant unemployment rate began rising toward the end of 2006. Since then, immigrants have seen larger decreases in employment and increases in unemployment than have natives. The pattern these changes suggest is borne out by a statistical analysis of employment and unemployment over the past 15 years. Despite a long-run trend of rising employment rates and falling unemployment rates, immigrants’’ economic outcomes in the short run are more strongly tied to the business cycle than those of natives. The natural follow-up question is why immigrant labor market outcomes are more cyclical. Since immigrants differ from natives in many ways, a number of explanations are possible:

Only a few large, nationally-representative datasets include information on both theowner and the business. We briefly describe several of the most respected and up-to-datesources of data on entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and small businesses. Moreinformation including estimates of recent trends in business ownership and performance(e.g. survival rates, sales, employment, payroll, profits and industry) from these datasetsis contained in Fairlie and Robb (2008).

Though praised for having opened the door for World War II veterans to receive a higher education and loans for homes, veterans of minority races benefited much less from the provisions of the G.I. Bill of 1944 compared to White veterans. This study is the first to compare White, Black, and Mexican veterans in regards to four specific benefits provided by the G.I. Bill: Education, occupation, income, and home ownership. Results show that White veterans have the highest levels of educational attainment, highest-ranked occupations, highest income, and highest rates of home ownership, then Mexican veterans, and lastly Black veterans.

How does job security influence productivity? I create a dataset from thebibliographic records of the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper seriesand from hand collected data from individual curricula vitae to compare productivity ofprofessors before and after tenure. This paper uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity designwith fixed effects and finds that the number of papers produced drops immediately aftertenure. Also, the pattern in productivity growth changes from increasing every year tohaving very little change in the years after tenure. Assuming researchers are similar preandpost-tenure except for the new position, this finding is suggests that tenure causes thedecrease in productivity. This gives credibility to the concern that tenured professors stopbeing productive.

The recent increase in the size of the Latino population in nontraditional areas of the United States, particularly in the Southeast, suggests that the spatial diffusion of Latinos is underway, leading to a qualitatively lower level of interregional segregation among Latinos and non-Latinos. Using combined Census and American Community Survey Data from 1980-2007 and a set of 488 county-group areas(Consistent PUMAs) that provide longitudinal geographic coverage of the United States, we analyze trends in the migration patterns and the rate of regional desegregation of Latinos and non-Latinos over time. We use count models of the flow of migrants between areas to test for changes in migration patterns between Latinos and non-Latinos controlling for spatial effects and economic pull factors.Results from these models indicate that the rate of desegregation due to migration patterns was about 39% lower in 2006-2007 than it was in 2000.