Economists let some light in on the shady market for paid sex
IT IS all too easy to become a lost soul in New Orleans. The annual meeting of the American Economic Association this month was part of a huge gathering of social scientists sprawled across the city. Each venue itself was a warren of meeting rooms. Take a wrong turning and a delegate seeking an earnest symposium on minimum wages might innocently end up in the conference session devoted to the market for paid sex.
The star attraction there was Steven Levitt, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of “Freakonomics”, a best-selling book. Mr Levitt presented preliminary findings* from a study conducted with Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. Their research on the economics of street prostitution combines official arrest records with data on 2,200 “tricks” (transactions), collected by Mr Venkatesh in co-operation with sex workers in three Chicago districts.
read the article in
The Economist
An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution
Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
