ECONOMISTS CLAIM to study markets in all their forms. But one, in particular, seems to make them blush: sex work. In a new book, “Sex Work by Numbers”, Stef Adriaenssens of KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, estimates that less than 5% of the 18,232 academic publications on the industry produced between 2000 and 2024 took an economic or business view. By comparison, 40% concerned biology or medicine, more than 25% related to psychology or psychiatry and almost 20% had to do with the law. A quick search for “sex work” or “prostitution” in the database of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a collection of working papers, generates just 178 results among 35,450 articles.
The new economics of sex work
ECONOMISTS CLAIM to study markets in all their forms. But one, in particular, seems to make them blush: sex work. In a new book, “Sex Work by Numbers”, Stef Adriaenssens of KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, estimates that less than 5% of the 18,232 academic publications on the industry produced between 2000 and 2024…
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