You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this episode 115. I am your host Thomas Smith.

I am so excited to bring you today's episode. This is an interview with doctors

Manisha Shaw and Scott Cunningham, they have done a study about what happens when we accidentally

decriminalize prostitution.

This is something that happened in Rhode Island. It's a real thing. I hadn't heard about it. Maybe you have, but they studied what some of the effects are. We're going to talk about it and they explain it best. So let's get over to that interview.

I'm joined by Dr. Manisha Shaw and Dr. Scott Cunningham. How are you guys doing today?

Good. Good, good. Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming on. I'm really interested in this study a lot of a lot of stuff to talk about I'm very

curious to learn more about it but first could we perhaps learn a bit more about you

starting with uh. Shaw.

Sure.

My name is Minisha Shaw and I am an associate professor

at UCLA and I am an economist by training and I'm in the Department of Public Policy here at

UCLA and most of my work is around kind of applied microeconomic issues

especially sort of the areas of health and economics.

I do a lot of work in developing countries and I'm very interested in risk behavior

and how people make risky decisions and a lot of my work has been around sex markets.

Hmm. Very interesting. All right, same question over to you Dr. Cunningham.

So I'm Scott Cunningham, I'm an associate professor at Baylor University and my area is the economics of crime and the economics of risky behaviors more generally.

I guess there's been, I've studied methamphetamine policy,

mass incarceration, marriage markets, and then, but most of my work has been on internet mediated

prostitution and regulate the regulation of prostitution markets.

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