tailieunhanh - An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution

If the pace of private spending proves insufficient to assure a sustained recovery, would further stimulus by monetary and fiscal policy be warranted? One lesson from the Great Depression is to guard against a too hasty withdrawal of fiscal and monetary stimulus in an economy recovering from a deep decline. The removal of fiscal and monetary stimulus in 1937 is thought to have stopped a recovery and caused a slump that did not end until WWII. Opponents of further stimulus maintain that the accumulation of additional government debt would lower future economic growth, but supporters argue that additional stimulus is. | An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh September 2007 Extremely Preliminary and Incomplete Comments Greatly Appreciated Extremely preliminary and incomplete. Please do not cite without prior permission of the authors. We thank William Evans Lawrence Katz John List and Peter Reuter for helpful comments and conversations. Amanda Agan and Marina Niessner provided outstanding research assistance. Dott XXXXX was instrumental in coordinating the collection of the field data. Paul Heaton generously provided the Chicago Police Department data. 1 Abstract Combining transaction-level data on street prostitutes with ethnographic observation and official police force data we analyze the economics of prostitution in Chicago. Prostitution because it is a market is much more geographically concentrated than other criminal activity. Street prostitutes earn roughly 25- 30 per hour roughly four times their hourly wage in other activities but this higher wage represents relatively meager compensation for the significant risk they bear. Prostitution activities are organized very differently across neighborhoods. Where pimps are active prostitutes appear to do better with pimps both providing protection and paying efficiency wages. Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small. The supply of prostitutes is relatively elastic as evidenced by the supply response to a 4th of July demand shock. Although technically illegal punishments are minimal for prostitutes and johns. A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4 400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week. 2 Unlike most other crimes prostitution is based on markets and thus potentially of special interest to economists. It is thus surprising that amidst the burgeoning literature on the economics of crime there is little analysis