This paper studies how recessions impact the supply of sex work. I consider a historical recession that affected British cotton textile production, an industry that employed a significant number of women and was geographically localized. To measure the size of the market for sex, I digitize new data on the locations of establishments where sex work occurred across Britain. The recession led to twelve more establishments per 100,000 people in exposed counties, an increase of approximately 20%. Informal establishments, such as pubs, accounted for three-fourths of the increase while brothels accounted for approximately 25%. I provide suggestive evidence that an outward shift in supply contributed to the increase.

In the late 1800s, local leaders in the United States established red-light districts to confine prostitution within cities. Progressive Era reformers began lobbying against this policy, arguing they made health and crime worse, which precipitated the closure of these districts in the 1910s. This paper assesses the public health consequences of closing red-light districts using city-level mortality statistics. I find that infant mortality increased by approximately 7% after closure. Congenital syphilis was a significant problem during the period, and this finding is consistent with increased syphilis transmission. Overall, the results suggest the public health concerns raised by reformers were overstated.

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were pervasive historically, yet we have little quantitative evidence on the health burden they imposed or the effectiveness of public health policies addressing them. This paper examines the health effects of Britains Contagious Disease Acts, a canonical nineteenth-century policy to combat STIs. These acts required registration, periodic physical examination, and forced isolation of sex workers. We show that this policy substantially reduced infections, mortality, and childlessness in regulated districts, but at the cost of severely violating sex workers rights. This was achieved by shrinking the market for sex and reducing the infection rate among sex workers.

Political economy theories of constituent-representative interactions typically focus on elections, yet many important issues arise between elections. We study how constituent and representatives interact outside of elections and how this interaction is shaped by advocacy efforts. In our model, representatives have an imperfect understanding of constituent preferences when faced with a novel policy issue and constituents face a coordination problem in signalling their preferences which advocacy groups can help overcome. To study these issues empirically we focus on a key period in the devel- opment of the women’s rights movement in the U.K. (1860s-1880s), a setting where the availability of detailed data on constituent petitions offers unique visibility into constituent-representative interactions. Our results show that advocacy efforts can cre- ate persistent increases in constituent signaling and that constituent signals influences MP votes, but only in the absence of elections. We also show that advocacy and sig- nalling focused on one policy can have spillover effects onto related policy areas, both by solving coordination problems and because representatives update their beliefs about constituent preferences.

This paper studies the impact of career concerns on technological change by analyzing the adoption of digital cinematography in the US motion picture industry. This setting allows us to collect rich data on the adoption of this new technology at the project-level (i.e., movie) as well as on the career of the main decision maker (i.e., director). We find that early career directors played a leading role in the adoption of digital technology and that this effect appears to be explained by career concerns, rather than alternative motives we consider and analyze. Technological savvy also plays a role.