Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Prostitution

Stephen Levitt, my favorite economist, is publishing a paper on the economics of prostitution. The paper is full of fun facts including:

--> 3% of sexual acts are given to police to avoid arrest

--> Sunday and Mondays are the slowest days of the week for business
and friday is the busiest

--> supply of prostitution is fairly elastic (july 4th a lot of temps
come in for the surplus business)


For those in the market, the paper is rich with information on pricing (a menu of sorts).

I emailed the paper to a friend of mine who found a very funny quote from the paper:

"Prostitutes who work with pimps have higher wages and better conditions (largely because pimps drum up supply).

Reflecting this, many of the prostitutes who didn't have pimps asked Levitt and Venkatesh (Levitt's coauthor) if they could please link them up with pimps. L&V planned a randomised experiment (randomly assigning prostitutes to pimps), but before they could carry it out, the pimps got angry at Venkatesh and told him that he would be killed if he returned. "

Data and Maps

I discovered a great new website called Understanding USA with my favorite internet channel surfer StumbleUpon. The site is full of interesting data presented in unique ways. My favorite is the distribution map, shown on the right, which depicts the areas of the United States are the most populated.