Trading HIV for sheep: Risky sexual behavior and the response of female sex workers to Tabaski in Senegal

We use a cohort of female sex workers (FSWs) in Senegal to show how large anticipated economic shocks lead to increased risky sexual behavior. Exploiting the exogenous timing of interviews, we study the effect of Tabaski, the most important Islamic festival celebrated in Senegal, in which most households purchase an expensive animal for sacrifice. Condom use, measured robustly via the list experiment, falls by between 27.3 percentage points (pp) (65.5%) and 43.1 pp (22.7%) in the 9 days before Tabaski, or a maximum of 49.5 pp (76%) in the 7 day period preceding Tabaski. The evidence suggests the economic pressures from Tabaski are key to driving the behavior change observed through the price premium for condomless sex. Those most exposed to the economic pressure from Tabaski were unlikely to be using condoms at all in the week before the festival. Our findings show that Tabaski leads to increased risky behaviors for FSWs, a key population at high risk of HIV infection, for at least 1 week every year and has implications for FSWs in all countries celebrating Tabaski or similar festivals. Because of the scale, frequency, and size of the behavioral response to shocks of this type, policy should be carefully designed to protect vulnerable women against anticipated shocks

Causal relations between knowledge-intensive business services and regional employment growth

This paper studies the causal relations between regional employment growth in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and overall regional employment growth using German labour-market data for the period 1999-2012. Adopting a recently developed technique, we are able to estimate a structural vector autoregressive model in which the causal directions between KIBS and other sectors are examined including various time lags. One main finding holds that although regional growth has a negative short-term effect on KIBS, KIBS growth has a long-term positive effect on the whole regional economy. This result confirms the claim that KIBS can play a key role in regional policies. Distinguishing between financial and non-financial KIBS, we find that financial KIBS have a procyclical effect on regional growth underlining the potential de-stabilizing effect of a large financial sector

Explicit solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries equation on the half line

Certain explicit solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries equation in the first quadrant of the $xt$-plane are presented. Such solutions involve algebraic combinations of truly elementary functions, and their initial values correspond to rational reflection coefficients in the associated Schr\"odinger equation. In the reflectionless case such solutions reduce to pure $N$-soliton solutions. An illustrative example is provided.Comment: 17 pages, no figure

Local fiscal multipliers of different government spending categories

This paper compares multipliers of different categories of US federal government spending, and in doing so provides a new insight as to why fiscal multipliers may differ across countries and time. We identify exogenous federal government spending shocks at the state level for defense and non-defense spending. Using a projection-based approach, we estimate the cumulative multiplier due to shocks in either of these spending categories. Our results indicate that defense spending yields lower multipliers than non-defense spending. Thus, focusing only on defense spending may result in underestimating the multiplier for government spending