Sex and Violence

Our relationship and defense of the first amendment is often peculiar. An excellent piece in the NYT discusses this quoting Justice Breyer.

But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively but virtually binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?

Maybe this is one of the reasons we have the one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world, along with one of the highest rates of violent crime.

Premarital Sex

It looks like a couple of sociologists are imitating economists with their book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. The New Republic reviewer has the traditional complaints seen from non-economists.

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, sociologists both, rely heavily on this theory to explain the sex lives of young adults today. The rise of “the hookup culture” at colleges, they argue, can be attributed in part to the increasing scarcity of men on campus—an oversupply of sellers works to a buyer’s advantage. Sexual economics also suggests that many women look unkindly on promiscuous members of the same sex out of the same impulse that makes retailers angry when Wal-Mart comes to town: they are being undersold, and now they have to give discounts or lose customers.

Regnerus and Uecker are either indifferent or tin-eared about how distasteful this idea is:

Sex might cost little or nothing—a few drinks or some attention and compliments, or simply a promise to be discreet about the liaison. Typically it’s more expensive than that, such as a perceived commitment to being in an exclusive relationship for a while. The highest price a man can pay is a lifetime promise to share all his wealth, income, and affections with a woman exclusively.

Equating an intimate act to a business transaction is not only crass and reductive; it is also analytically misleading. The analogy to commerce implies an adversarial situation wherein the buyer always wants to pay the minimum and the seller wants to get the maximum. But men often find themselves bestowing attention, falling in love, and getting married after they have already been sleeping with the woman in question. Sexual economics has trouble accounting for that. Men willingly overspend, which describes approximately no one who buys a car. Similarly, the pay-for-play hypothesis fails to capture the fact that most women do not want to extract caring and love from a person disinclined to offer it, and they do not see sex as something they wish they could avoid until marriage.

The author fails to understand supply and demand in this context as a matching model. He also has apparently never heard of signaling. 

OKtrends

I love the work done at OKtrends.

Love and Hate

From SMBC Comics:

Relationship Scholar Dies

The academic community lost an important researcher, Caryl Rusbult. From her obit in Science News:

Caryl Rusbult was the queen of close relationships. For more than 30 years, and for the past six years at Vrije University in Amsterdam, she studied how some men and women form lasting, supportive marriages. Rusbult’s work led her to conclude that close partners are interpersonal artists, sculpting one another’s strengths and weaknesses so as to bring out the best in each other. She called this the Michelangelo Phenomenon, a reference to the great Renaissance sculptor who said that he used a chisel to release ideal figures from blocks of stone in which they slumbered.
......
And the discussion would have been lively. Shortly after meeting one another in the early 1980s, Reis and Rusbult got into a fierce debate at a psychology conference about what people really want in close relationships. Reis championed emotional intimacy. Rusbult insisted that partners want to coordinate their behavior so they can achieve goals that each holds dear.

“Ten years and much research later, I was convinced that she was right,” Reis says.
......
Real-life dating and married couples provided her team with glimpses of the Michelangelo Phenomenon in action. Time and again, romantic pairings succeeded if each partner detected the other’s self-reported dreams and aspirations and found ways to guide him or her toward those goals. This process hinged on identifying and working with a partner’s personal flaws, just as a sculptor incorporates irregularities in a block of stone into a masterpiece.

Pricing Bareback

A new take on the Levitt's prostitution paper.

Becoming a Super Stripper

While I was in Europe I got behind on some interesting posts. Freakonomics and others pointed me to this one:

Let’s face it. Stripping is hard work. There’s judgment from outside the club. Competition inside the club. And, you’re an independent contractor. There’s having to make nice when you don’t feel like making nice. There’s the pressure to hustle. Pressure not to hustle. There’s the standing in 8″ heels all night. And above all, the ever-present challenge of making bank. That’s where Star Light’s Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. comes in! Spend the day with us, and we’ll share tips on sales (because stripping is sales), organizing your finances, and managing the day-to-day stress of stripping. Find your path to being a SuperStripper. What’s a SuperStripper? She’s an amazing woman who uses stripping as an avenue to create financial freedom and the future she wants! Someone who doesn’t let the job define her.

There is no doubt that more money can be made if dancers use proper techniques. In fact many of them are budding neuroscientists. The link between sex, money and risk is well established. And once the money is made, properly managing it is of the utmost importance since their careers are often very short.

HPV and Sex

I must admit, my libertarian sensitivites get a bit out of order when I hear the government mandate anything, but this might be a legitimate public health consideration:

From The Economist print edition: A new vaccine sparks controversy

“THE governor's action seems to signify that God's moral law regarding sex outside of marriage can be transgressed without consequence.” Those words came this week from Rick Scarborough of Vision America, a Christian lobbying group. The US Pastor Council and various Republican politicians have piled in too.

Usually, this sort of right-wing animosity is reserved for the likes of Hillary Clinton, but this week's attack was on one of the Christian right's favourite sons: Rick Perry, the deeply religious Republican governor of Texas. His offence? Promoting the use of a highly effective new vaccine that is sure to save many women from a nasty form of cancer. But to some people, it is tantamount to encouraging promiscuity.

On February 2nd Mr Perry bypassed the state legislature and mandated vaccination against the human papilloma virus (HPV). His order would affect all girls entering sixth grade (at about 11) unless their parents opt out in writing. Perhaps 20m Americans carry this virus, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the country. Most strains are harmless, but a few can lead to cervical cancer, the second most deadly form of cancer in women.

Merck, a drugs giant, won federal approval for its HPV vaccine last year and has been lobbying for its adoption. California, South Dakota, New Hampshire and other states now make it available. Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia are considering the matter, while Washington state this week announced a voluntary scheme. But no state has mandated its use until now.

Why did Mr Perry do it? Some sneerers have noted that his former chief of staff is now a lobbyist for Merck. Others think that the wily governor is distancing himself from his conservative base so that he can make a plausible vice-presidential candidate in 2008. But there is another explanation: that he had the courage to make a politically difficult but sound policy decision. As he said this week: “If the medical community developed a vaccine for lung cancer,” he asked, “would the same critics oppose it, claiming it would encourage smoking?”

Time will tell if this really leads to substantial increase in teen sex. The differential adoption of the vaccine by State will provide a nice natural experiment. My guess is the results might be similar to this paper by Thomas Stratmann.

Laws requiring minors to seek parental consent or to notify a parent prior to obtaining an abortion raise the cost of risky sex for teenagers. Assuming choices to engage in risky sex are made rationally, parental involvement laws should lead to less risky sex among teens, either because of a reduction of sexual activity altogether or because teens will be more fastidious in the use of birth control ex ante. Using gonorrhea rates among older women to control for unobserved heterogeneity across states, our results indicate that the enactment of parental involvement laws significantly reduces risky sexual activity among teenage girls. We estimate reductions in gonorrhea rates of 20 percent for Hispanics and 12 percent for whites. While we find a relatively small reduction in rates for black girls, it is not statistically significant. We speculate that the racial heterogeneity has to do with differences in family structure across races.

Wish Me Luck

Despite having what would have been an excellent ASSA session turned down, I've decided to try my hand at organizing another one or two.

Here are the details of the first one:

Session: The Economics of Paid Sex Markets JEL: J4

Session Organizer: Taggert J. Brooks University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

Chair: Alan Krueger Princeton University

Paper 1:
"An Empirical Analysis of Street Prostitutes." Steve Levitt , University of Chicago and Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia University

Abstract:

We collect transaction-level data on over 50 street prostitutes over the course of an 18 month period. We document that prostitutes working in the same area earn very different wages and these wage differentials can be partially explained by observable characteristics.
Considering the risks borne by the prostitutes, they are not particularly well compensated. The prostitutes engage in price discrimination across customers. We also explore the role of pimps.

Discussant: Lena Edlund

Paper 2:
"Enforcing Licensing Requirements: Implications for Disease Transmission in the Sex Market" Manisha Shah, University of Melbourne, and Paul Gertler University of California – Berkley and NBER

Abstract:

Several countries are pursuing the regulation of commercial sex work in order to decrease the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and reduce the probability of a generalized HIV/AIDS epidemic. In many Latin American countries, the commercial sex market is characterized by two sectors, brothel and street, where the latter is marked by riskier behavior (e.g., lower rates of condom use) and higher prevalence of STIs. This paper studies the public health effects of enforcing licensing requirements in a two-sector commercial sex market, where enforcement varies between sectors. Specifically, we use nationally representative data from Ecuador to examine the effect of enforcement in brothels vs. enforcement in the street on overall STI prevalence. We exploit regional variation in the frequency of police visits to verify sex workers are complying with licensing requirements. The major finding of this paper is that increasing police presence in the street sector is most effective in decreasing disease. We find that increasing enforcement by one police visit per month in the street significantly decreases STIs by 8 percent. The second major finding is that increasing enforcement by one police visit per month in the brothel sector has no significant effect on disease outcomes. We propose a partial equilibrium model which is an extension of our previous model in Gertler, Shah, and Bertozzi (2005) to explain these findings.

The model predicts that the cost of enforcement increases the price of commercial sex. As the price of sex increases, demand decreases and the overall number of clients decreases. The effect of enforcement on disease works through the increase in prices, as fewer clients implies less disease. In addition to the price effect, increased enforcement decreases the returns of one sector relative to another. For example, increased street enforcement encourages street sex workers into the less risky brothel sector, improving overall public health. However, increased brothel enforcement could encourage non-compliant brothel sex workers into the street sector, exacerbating public health problems.

We test the predictions of the model and find that an additional police visit in the street increases the price of non-condom sex by ten percent and decreases the number of clients. In addition, sex workers are significantly less likely to join the street sector for an increase in street enforcement. These results explain the 8 percent decrease in overall disease for a given increase in street enforcement. In the unlicensed brothel sector, however, prices do not significantly increase with enforcement. In addition, simulations show that non-compliant sex workers who leave the brothel sector switch to the street sector, resulting in potentially worse public health outcomes. The findings of this paper indicate that the efficacy of regulation does not result from stricter enforcement in the brothel sector but rather from clamping down on the street sector. To minimize perverse effects of regulation, enforcement should account for the underlying characteristics of the sex market and be concentrated in the sector which is marked by lower condom use and higher STI prevalence.

Discussant: Emily Oster, University of Chicago

Paper 3:
“In Da Club: An Econometric Analysis of Strip Club Patrons” Taggert J. Brooks, University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

Abstract:

Conservative estimates from the National Health and Social Life Survey
(NHSLS) suggest 17 million Americans went to a club that featured nude or semi-nude dancers in 1991. Their attendance comprises nearly 67 million visits, 10 million more than the attendance at major league baseball games that year. With reported total revenues earned by strip clubs at 15 billion dollars a year (Smyth, 2005; Thompson, et. al., 2003), the industry arrived at this point following a doubling of the number of strip clubs between 1987 and 1992 according to Hanna (2005). In this paper I estimate a hurdle model using the NHSLS to test two popular theories which purport to explain the rapid increase in the number of clubs. I find that for those who reported changing their behavior in response to AIDS/HIV they were much more likely to go to a strip club and more frequent visitors than those who did not change their behavior. On the second explanation I fail to find support for the belief that attendance at strip clubs was motivated by the desire to escape the uncertain rules of a gender integrated work place. The rise of societal sensitivities to sexual harassment in the workplace does not appear to explain patron attendance at a strip club.

Discussant: Scott Drewianka, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

Paper 4:
“From Sex to Gender”, Lena Edlund , Columbia University and Evelyn Korn Philipps-Universit at Marburg.

Abstract:

Humans are gonochoric, i.e., the male and female reproduction functions are in separate individuals. Here, we consider the alternative, hermaphroditism. A study of the pros and cons of hermaphroditism yields insights into gender roles as we know them.

Specifically, we find that: (i) female chastity is the preserve of gonochorism; (ii) secondary sexual differentiation, e.g., dimorphism, is a precondition for the existence of pure males; and (iii) only among gonochorsts could intra-male violence, a form of secondary sexual differentiation, be selected for.

Discussant: Ted Bergstrom, University of California Santa Barbara

A Simple Crush

How can you not love a woman like Emily Oster? Her work is featured in Esquire here. To think, I actually had her lined up to present in a session I organized for the AEA, but the powers that be decided against the session. How could they turn us down?

And how is this not hot?

I consider a world where individuals live a maximum of two periods. All individuals live for certain in period 1, and there is a chance, p, of surviving until period 2. Each individual receives utility from certain income, y, in each period, as well as their choices of number of sexual partners in each period: sigma1 and sigma2. Total utility in period i is u(y, sigmai), and we will assume that u(.) is concave in both y and sigmai. In a world without HIV, total lifetime
utility can be written:

Utot = u(y, sigma1) + pu(y, sigma2) (1)

Income is fixed in each period so the only choices individuals make are about sexual behavior. The first order condition defining the choice of sigmai is usigmai(y, sigmai) = 0. Note that optimal choice of sigmai can vary with y, even in the framework without HIV. The direction of this relationship will depend on the sign of usigmay. If the cross partial is positive, richer people will have more sexual
partners; if it is negative, they will have fewer. For example, if sexual partners cost money, this will deliver a positive cross partial, which would imply that richer people have more partners.

How is that not hot? I mean, sex, partial derivatives and utility maximization. I defintely have a crush.

Quad S

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.