Read article.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that when a large number of people drop into town, many of them men, local sex workers see an opportunity to do business. Tourists worry less about being spotted by a neighbour or a colleague. And to the extent that some men may be weighing up the relative attractions of paying for sex versus looking for a wife or girlfriend, being in a city far from home makes looking for a girlfriend relatively less tempting.
It may seem alarmingly cold to view men as weighing up the costs and the benefits of finding a wife versus hiring a prostitute – and just as stark to view women as making the same decision in reverse – but the idea is not mine.
Almost a decade ago, two economists, Lena Edlund of Columbia University and Evelyn Korn of the University of Marburg, published an article, “A Theory of Prostitution” (PDF), which modelled exactly these decisions. One of their purposes was to explain why sex workers can earn so much money. The abstract begins with a puzzle: “Prostitution is low-skill, labour intensive, female and well paid.” The economists suggested a “marriage market explanation” as the reason why. If marriage can provide women with an important source of income, “it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone marriage market earnings”.
Vía Francisco Capella.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario