Martin, L., Lotspeich, R., & Stark, L.2016-01-112016-01-112012Martin, L., Lotspeich, R., & Stark, L. (2012). Early intervention to avoid sex trading and trafficking of Minnesota’s female youth: A benefit-cost analysis. Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and UROC. 90 pp.http://mnhttf.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Benefit-Cost-Study-Full.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/11212/2692We provide analysis of an innovative policy to reduce social harms from sex trading among female youth, including adolescents (e.g. survival sex, prostitution, sex trafficking). The policy consists of early intervention efforts with adolescent females to prevent and dissuade them from sex trading. Our framework treats the program as an investment project and calculates its net present value, where the benefits are understood to be harms avoided by successfully reducing the extent of sex trading. We approach the analysis from the narrow perspective of the public budget. That is, both the cost of the program and the specific harms from sex trading are evaluated in terms of the burden they impose on a community’s government expenditures. We do not examine the full social costs of sex trading. Our valuation of harms is a conservative estimate based on available social science data. We conduct sensitivity analysis with respect to key model parameters such as program effectiveness, discount rate and other model parameters. The program returns positive Net Present Value in all but the most pessimistic scenarios, which we believe are highly unlikely to prevail. In our best estimate it returns $34 in benefit for each $1 in cost. (Author Abstract)en-USchild abuseprostitutionpreventioneconomicsresearchArticle