Legal Prostitution: Identifying Key Outcomes

More research has been conducted on the legalization of some vices than others. One severely under-researched topic is the legalization of prostitution. Activists, politicians, and pundits frequently make grand claims about the dangers or benefits of reforming prostitution laws, but their claims are typically ideologically and politically driven, rather than being evidence-based. This Research Note presents a unique set of studies that employ either (1) a longitudinal design that evaluates key metrics before and after legalization in a particular location or (2) a comparison of legal and illegal sex workers operating in the same location, across a few cities with different policy models (criminalization, decriminalization, legalization), or across cities that vary in the extent to which they abide by national legal norms. All studies in the second category are small-N case studies, which I argue are far superior to superficial large-N designs, including two studies that attempted to assess outcomes of criminalization and legalization across 161 countries. The small-N case studies discussed here identify key outcomes of both criminalization and legalization, and their research designs can serve as a models going forward.