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The economics of love and sex
I am not kidding when I say this, if I had to live in a household in which my husband had more than one wife, there would have to be alcohol involved; at bare minimum a cocktail hour, but preferably an open bar. The reality is, of course, that if you are in a polygynous relationship in the ...
Recently I have found myself in trouble twice for my choice of words. The first time was for calling sex workers "prostitutes," and the second time was for calling prostitutes "sex workers." Frankly, I didn’t buy either of the arguments. The first person to chew me out objected to the word ...
The most common form of domestic terrorism in the U.S. is violent attacks on abortion clinics. Between 1973 and 2003, over 300 abortion providers were the target of acts of extreme violence by anti-abortion groups. A new paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) last week ...
I tell my students that a good writer always keeps their audience in mind, and that when they write a paper in my class that audience is me. So, I have to wonder what was going through the head of one of my students last week when he submitted a paper with the line: "A woman over the age of forty ...
OkCupid’s dating research blog has worked hard to convince readers that they should never pay for online dating. The basis of their argument is that there are just too few subscribers on fee-for-service dating sites to make it worth the lonely single's while. I won’t argue their point on that ...
I have an idea for a Hollywood movie. An ambitious, young, heterosexual woman disguises herself as a lesbian in order to land herself the job of her dreams. Her handsome colleague takes her into his confidence and, of course, she falls in love with him. After a series of comedic events, she ...
Can watching the market for sex toys help economists predict a recession? Economists at their most playful like to find interesting ways to watch the market for signs of an impending economic downturn. After we get tired of watching inventories and production capacity, we turn to other leading ...
The "Just Say No" campaign in the late 1980s increased the severity of sentencing for drug offenders in the U.S. Since that time, particularly since the mid-1990’s, incarceration rates have been steadily increasing to the point that the U.S. now has the one of the highest incarceration rates in the ...
There are two facts about HIV that are difficult to reconcile. The first fact is that the transmission rate of the disease is extremely low; the risk of being infected from an person who has the disease through vaginal intercourse is about one in a thousand or 8-12% per-partner-year.* The second ...
British firms have sunk millions into new technology which will enable people to test themselves for Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) using their mobile phones and a chip they purchase for less than $2. The motivation behind the initiative is to encourage STI testing with a goal to reducing ...
I had lunch yesterday with an economist friend of mine who was lamenting the fact that when a market fails to operate efficiently we sometimes advocate for policy intervention without stopping to see if that policy actually improves the outcome. He was talking about his own work that looks at the ...
The Chinese may not talk about sex, but they certainly do it. In fact, they probably do it just as much as the rest of us. What is obvious though is that the lack of dialogue around sex, and particularly the absence of sex education in the schools, has serious consequences for the nation as ...
Asymmetric information creates a moral hazard problem if one party in a transaction cannot observe the (possibly bad) behaviour of the other party. It was moral hazard that caused the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in the U.S. housing market, as those who owned the risky mortgages could not observe ...
When searching for a mate online, singles are more likely to initiate contact with other online singles who are more attractive than themselves. When the market clears, so to speak, individuals in couples tend to be very similar to each other in terms of attractiveness. While there are a variety of ...
I have theory, it is a personal theory not quite backed up by empirical evidence, that one of the reasons so many people are single is that they are poor judges of their position on the dating market. If you read online dating profiles, you often see that people write: "I'm not willing to settle ...