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Re: Economists Studying Hookers - Levitt and Venkatesh
Playing Devils Advocate 285 reads
posted

I wonder how much a provider charging $400 makes a year...half a million?  Are high end providers millionaires?  Those are the most interesting economists questions...who cares about street prostitution...that's chump change and most of it goes to pimps anyway.

tomsmith021461 reads

In a economics study that may someday propoel them to Nobel Proze winners in Economic and in the wake of Governbior Spitzer there is a formal econmics tsudy of prostitution in Chicago out on the streets at http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=85677.

Levitt is also a "Freakonomist" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics )

The enitre 48 pages of study is at http://economics.uchicago.edu/pdf/Prostitution%205.pdf

Should he study independnets who have webistes (not craiglist) ans see what the higher end of coutesans are like and have to offer ??

Any comments ??

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http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=85677

An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution
by Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Reading for Tuesday, 22 January 2008.


Combining transaction-level data on street prostitutes with ethnographic observation and official police force data, we analyze the economics of prostitution in Chicago.  Prostitution, because it is a market, is much more geographically concentrated than other criminal activity. Street prostitutes earn roughly $25-$30 per hour, roughly four times their hourly wage in other activities, but this higher wage represents relatively meager compensation for the significant risk they bear. Prostitution activities are organized very differently across neighborhoods. Where pimps are active, prostitutes appear to do better, with pimps both providing protection and paying efficiency wages. Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small. The supply of prostitutes is relatively elastic, as evidenced by the supply response to a 4th of July demand shock. Although technically illegal, punishments are minimal for prostitutes and johns. A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4,400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week



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-- Modified on 4/6/2008 8:55:46 AM

Related Link: An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution

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Closet coprophobic290 reads

Yada, yada, yada...it's always about street prostitution because those studies get public health grants, mostly because of the STD implications. No one is interested in babes that make 4-500 dollars an hour, that only breeds envy among the cottage cheese lumpy bitches approving these studies...

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Playing Devils Advocate286 reads

I wonder how much a provider charging $400 makes a year...half a million?  Are high end providers millionaires?  Those are the most interesting economists questions...who cares about street prostitution...that's chump change and most of it goes to pimps anyway.

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sweetnicole1416 reads

for lack of their knowledge and their insight I believe we are all lumped together. And I also feel they can feel better about it if they think we are all losers drug addicts and abused woman.
If we were to be looked at any other way by those doing the studies, in a real light of who we are and that this is a choice and a business decission by woman who are bright,successful charismatic otherwise law abiding citizens, there would be nothind to study. And I also believe you are right that it is threatening to some woman who think their mate may be playin with some sweet possably younger and sexier woman than her.  Well society is not ready here in the good old USA to accept any thing other than what they wish to depict it as.  In other countries it is accepted and no big deal. To many holier than thou preachers here.

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Katielady2006357 reads

It reenforces the mainstream ideas of street walkers and doesn't really further the understanding of this business. The study looks like a joke. I can't believe they wasted their time, to be honest.

As for the higher end business, I don't think it would add to that particular study because they're strictly looking at the street level.

Katie

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GaGambler370 reads

What a load of crap. I was only able to get through three or four pages of this dribble before I was ready to retch. Another example of "intellectual" writing about shit that they don't have the slightest understanding of, and coming up with conclusions that match their own preconceved opinions. What a waste of time.(Mine, not theirs)

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