 Prostitutions at the heart of a lot of debates, even whether you call it prostitution or sex work, means that you've somehow chosen to look at it in a particular way. We never really looked at it as a form of female oppression on the one hand or as a form of fantastic female entrepreneurship on the other. We were always quite agnostic about it. We just said, does money be in exchange for this activity? And it's huge. It's connected to migration. It's connected to crime. It's connected to drugs. And the extent to which it is connected to these things depends largely on how it is regulated. I am Marina. I am an economist. I teach at the University of Reading where I also got my PhD. I became interested in social norms because I am Italian originally. This is a country where social norms are very different across different regions. And the whole idea of how people conform with social norms and how that dictates their choices was something that I really wanted to look at when I specialized after my undergraduates. I thought that would be an interesting thing to carry on studying and I could learn a lot that wasn't just true of my country but of a range of other countries in the world where there's a whole range of formal and informal ways of doing things that maybe isn't captured quite so well within economics in general or at least wasn't at the time. People started getting much more interested in social norms as time went by. So what started out as a kind of rather far out project became something a bit more mainstream over time. That piece of work was motivated by personal experiences so I noticed that a lot of people like me who had come to the UK as migrants when they had children they were concerned that their kids would fit in but at the same time wanted their kids to preserve some of the values that they had come to the country with that made them sort of distinctively carrying two cultures with themselves. We all tend to expect children to want a very stable environment but the reality is that children don't really have terms of reference as to what would be stable for them. So they like their habits on a day-to-day basis but they're not really hung up about what comes into those habits or what shape their family should be or their house or the neighborhood they live in because they don't know anything else. The question of what values get passed on to children is how well they can cope with encountering different situations. It's something that is not typical of an immigrant parent it's something that every parent has to face. They also throw back at you the limitations that you have in viewing the world. That whole idea that their well-being hinges on being well-adjusted as in kind of stable is probably wrong. Children are evolving and growing. The ability to adapt and resilience is possibly the most important component of well-being. A lot of the psychological research as well is throwing up this importance of resilience and the ability to actually adjust to what life throws at you. In the meantime, the whole question of migration and how people integrate well or less well in the countries that they migrate to became very prominent in political terms and so we started thinking about the general way in which not just one family integrates but the general way in which communities integrate within a host country or not and you could have different models also of integration of migrants. You could have a melting pot a bit like here in the United States but you could also have rather more isolated communities like you tended to get in the United Kingdom and what that means in terms of preserving the original values and at the same time getting some kind of diversity in the culture but when it all goes well that's not a problem when things start going less well then all of a sudden these communities are very identifiable and therefore they can incur large costs so we were trying to tease out those trade-offs and try and figure out what they meant for different countries. There's still a lot in that work that is interesting and can tell us a lot. The stigma that is carried by engaging in a profession like sex work impacts the well-being of the people who are in the trade. We realized that there just wasn't much work that economists had done that looked at prostitution from an angle other than a form of crime and because we had been doing so much work on looking at formal and informal women's work and gender we thought okay this may be a good arena in which to look both at what it means to be doing a job that carries stigma and what it means to look at gender relations and social relations broadly around something which is a worldwide industry because sex work exists everywhere and has always existed. Regulation very often is driven by the concern to reinforce certain moral standards for a society and flies totally in the face of actually getting good welfare outcomes for that same society. In that sense it's a typical area for an economist to look at because it's about the interplay between morals and what goes on then in markets. We were interested not just in the sex workers themselves but the outcomes for society at large so it's a transaction that involves two people so there will be clients, there will be sex workers they're not necessarily all clients are men and all sex workers are women actually so there's interesting gender dynamics going on there as well. Of course there's a range of other actors involved intermediation and all the rest of it and very different outcomes depending on how it is regulated within the United States itself there is a wide range of different regulatory regimes for sex work across states and it means different things for public health as well. Politicians tend to view it as a kind of public nuisance and a kind of public morality type issue. The reality is there are a range of people working for whom this is a livelihood opportunity and it's also the reality that there is a demand for this so some of what the project involved at least at the start was actually talking to a lot of sex workers in different segments of the industry and trying to talk to also outreach services which are often set up by former sex workers themselves but also with the Home Office in the United Kingdom and with policing services and immigration services discussing what the dynamics of this workforce were and just generally trying to understand what would be the best way to regulate prostitution and from the sort of pure again welfareist perspective it's fairly obvious that pushing any activity in the shadows is not going to improve the welfare of anybody and also thinking that you can eliminate an activity or adopt a model where you're sort of trying to save people or rescue people from those jobs doesn't necessarily work or doesn't necessarily work for everybody. The gender dynamics in different countries determine very much how it is regulated but also how the different segments work and the degree of agency that the sex workers have in the different segments are also very different and their reflect on their earnings their reflect also on the stigma that the activity carries and what they can do to disguise it or when the activity is more acceptable to consider it as part of the skills they have it does a lot of the economics of it that is still there to be investigated really.