If the average escort selling sex in the US worked 2, hours a year, her income would place her in the top 0. You may want to argue that their jobs are risky in terms of violence, disease and arrest, but if risk explained the high earnings then the women doing the riskiest sex work, those walking the streets, would earn more.
There is very little research that can claim to explain the high wage premium to sex work, particularly to escorts, and even less data to support the theories that do make that claim. The earning data suggests then that the women working the streets, who presumably have limited marriage prospects, need little compensation to encourage them to forgo marriage and enter the sex trade.
Escorts, on the other hand, are drawn from a socio-economic group with better marriage prospects and are therefore paid a healthy premium to enter the trade. Recently, data has been collected from sex worker rating sites on over 40, sex workers in Canada and the US in an attempt to find some empirical support for this theory.
The authors feel that this provides evidence to support the marriage theory — as women age they face a bigger risk that they will never marry and therefore need to be compensated by more to discourage them from exiting the sex market in favour of the marriage market.
Once a woman reaches her thirties, though, her future marriage prospects are limited such that she requires less compensation to stay on the market. Does this evidence really support the theory though?
