Unveiling the Price of Obscenity: Evidence from Closing Prostitution Windows in the Netherlands

This paper quantifies the aversion of residents to on-site prostitution. To establish causality, we first exploit the fact that Amsterdam's Red Light Districts (RLDs) are delimited by canals, together with a policy that closed several prostitution windows since 2007. Using a two-dimensional difference-in-discontinuity estimator, we find that households require at least 6,000 euros/year to be right next to a brothel. To estimate the economic impact outside the RLD, we also look at the closings of all brothels in Utrecht in 2013. Using a spatial difference-in-slope estimator, the effect on house prices is found to be heterogeneous and some households pay up to 1,600 euros/year to be distant from prostitution. Both cities also experienced crime reduction in the RLDs, but the explained changes in house prices are mostly driven by drug-related crimes and minor nuisances. In Amsterdam, more than 70% of the discount applied to houses beside brothels remains unexplained

Standby power consumption estimation by interacting leakage current mechanisms in nanoscaled CMOS digital circuits

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The Large Magellanic Cloud and the Distance Scale

The Magellanic Clouds, especially the Large Magellanic Cloud, are places where multiple distance indicators can be compared with each other in a straight-forward manner at considerable precision. We here review the distances derived from Cepheids, Red Variables, RR Lyraes, Red Clump Stars and Eclipsing Binaries, and show that the results from these distance indicators generally agree to within their errors, and the distance modulus to the Large Magellanic Cloud appears to be defined to 3% with a mean value of 18.48 mag, corresponding to 49.7 Kpc. The utility of the Magellanic Clouds in constructing and testing the distance scale will remain as we move into the era of Gaia.Comment: 23 pages, accepted for publication in Astrophysics and Space Science. From a presentation at the conference The Fundamental Cosmic Distance Scale: State of the Art and the Gaia Perspective, Naples, May 201