The U.S. food industry (that being fast food chains and grocery stores) benefits greatly from penal labor. This project analyzes agricultural prison labor and how it connects to multi billion dollar corporations in America. There is a need for more awareness to be brought on this topic, this project answers that call. I will specifically be looking at how agriculture is grown and harvested by prisoners in California. Past research has always highlighted the economics of prison labor. Other research has looked at why prisons are becoming more privatized. This project will build on current articles which describe how penal labor is tied with fast food and grocery store chains. The type of labor prisoners perform will also be specifically categorized whether it be harvesting or packaging goods for companies. I will also discuss the prison industrial complex and how laws keep PIC not only possible but profitable. I will be studying both state and federal prisons, with a main focus on California state prisons. The main research method for this project will be case studies and news reports. Case studies are useful because they can be used to explore the more intricate parts of this topic. The goal of my project is to amplify the voices of those incarcerated and build a platform for this issue that continues today. Labor in prisons has been manipulated to only profit a minute set of people and this project calls for a change in that regard.

Nighttime light (NTL) data is now a standard proxy for local economic activity, widely used to estimate the effects of infrastructure investment where administrative statistics are unreliable. This paper identifies a possible systematic threat to that approach, which it calls correlated co-investment bias. Development financiers, including China, the World Bank, and recipient governments, independently select the same high-potential corridors for investment. When several commit to one corridor at roughly the same time, the resulting NTL response cannot be attributed to any single investment. Because the choice of investment location is assumed to follow development potential, the bias should concentrate among the projects that appear most effective, failing to average out in large samples and inflating estimated treatment effects. Drawing on over 400 geocoded Chinese infrastructure projects across 49 Sub-Saharan African countries and a harmonized 1992 to 2024 NTL series, this paper studies the bias at the hexagonal grid level in three stages. A naive two-way fixed effects event study establishes an inflated baseline. Adding a control for co-locating World Bank projects yields a lower bound on the bias. Documentary case studies then test whether projects with larger estimated effects show more co-investment. A completed case study of Chinese budget support along the Tanzania Central Line illustrates the mechanism: the observed NTL increase aligns with a co-located standard gauge railway and power line, not the Chinese investment project itself. This paper formalizes the bias, estimates a lower bound, and argues that hyperlocal NTL attribution requires explicit accounting for co-investment.

Rome's nasoni drinking fountains scattered throughout Rome represent a critical but under-analyzed intersection of hydraulic infrastructure, civic space and public architecture. While these fountains originated in the 1870s as a democratic initiative to provide free water across the city their design and distribution were subsequently shaped by shifting ideological agendas of the twentieth century. This research investigates the evolution of the nasone from an egalitarian object into a tool of national cultural signaling during Fascist times. By synthesizing archival research with field based typological mapping this study evaluates how over 2000 nasoni act as connective tissue within the Roman urban fabric mediating between the city's ancient monumental heritage and the afterlife of Fascist era remodeling.

Surveillance pricing is a method of price discrimination in which firms use personal data to set individualized prices. By replacing shared price signals with personalized prices, surveillance disrupts the informational role of prices described in economic theory. This paper argues that the ethical problem with surveillance pricing cannot be fully explained by existing frameworks focused on privacy, consent, or price discrimination. Even when transactions are voluntary and privacy is preserved, the use of data to determine prices undermines consumers’ ability to evaluate, compare, and understand market conditions. As a result, consumers are deprived of access to reliable information and are placed in epistemically disadvantaged positions relative to firms.