Tuesday Lunch Series welcomes Jessica Bean, assistant professor, Economics, presenting the lecture, "Sex Sells: Prostitution in Economics and History."

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The Tuesday Faculty Lunch Series welcomes Jessica Bean, assistant professor, Economics, presenting a lecture titled “Sex Sells: Prostitution in Economics and History.” The economics of prostitution has received a recent surge of attention, both in the academic literature and in a series of articles published in The Economist – including a very recent editorial arguing in favor of decriminalizing sex work. A lot of this renewed interest has been driven by the greatly increased availability of data that has come from the movement of the sex trade to the internet, and has allowed economists to apply standard tools of economic analysis to the market for transactional sex. Economic historians, however, have thus far largely ignored sex work as a dimension of female labor market participation in the past, most likely because of the lack of quantitative sources and the often informal or underground nature of prostitution as a form of employment. In an ongoing research project that makes use of the limited historical data that does exist, a co-author and Bean are examining the role that prostitution played in female labor market opportunities in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this talk, Bean will discuss the approaches that economists have taken to studying prostitution, highlight some of the more interesting findings in the recent empirical and theoretical literature, and then discuss the historical context and how the economics of prostitution may have differed – or not – in the nineteenth century.


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