karn1948

So did mine... until I read the original research paper.

This is pretty much equivalent reasoning to that paper:

Person goes to a doctor with a tumor, wants to have it removed. Doctor says "research shows that dying and being cut open are often associated, so you're better not having the surgery."

Most of their paper is admitting that the data is dodgy, that their methods are dodgy, that the statistical significance of their conclusions are dodgy AND... that their method can't even establish that legalization actually leads to increased human trafficking.

Furthermore, they don't even consider various types of regulation, other than whether pimping/brothels are allowed or not. I'm assuming that is because their data and methods were so dodgy to begin with that they stretched it as thin as they possibly could in order to reach any conclusions, and doing any deeper analysis would completely break their "research".

So here's an obvious solution that, AFAIK, hasn't been tried yet... require a license to provide prostitution, don't issue licenses to non-citizens, and making doing business with an unlicensed prostitute a serious crime. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but this rubbish research doesn't give any reason to believe either case.

If it's in math, no need to fight for a tenure-track position. The finance industry would like to have a few hundred thousand words with you...

(hint: all of them are "dollar")

How do you determine what data is worth knowing? Also, do you do it per-client, per-industry, or...?

CiCi's pizza... all you can eat.

As linked by another redditor just below:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986065

As for specific pages... "most of them". I'm not exaggerating, just spend 15 minutes looking through it if you feel that forming an accurate opinion on this is worth 15 minutes of your time.

For brevity, I'll give you these golden nuggets just from pgs 11 and 12:

Our dependent variable (Trafficking) captures the incidence of human trafficking into a country (...)

and

Our dependent variable thus does not reflect actual trafficking flows, and needs to be interpreted cautiously.

and

the low quality of data will not bias our coefficient estimates, but will only make it less likely the coefficients are statistically significant.

and

Still, the results should be interpreted with caution.

and

the indicator is arguably positively correlated with actual cases of trafficking, so the index remains meaningful.

...but they never present an argument for why it would be positively correlated....