Unexpected Outcomes of Vice Regulation: Pornography Laws, Supplier Exit, and Rape
From 2023, 23 states required pornography sites to verify every visitor’s age. Pornhub, the largest, left 22 of those states rather than check ages, starting with Utah in May 2023.
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Monthly Google search interest in each state from January 2022 to December 2025, against the average of the states that never passed a law. The paper follows FBI crime counts in 2,052 counties through the same months.
Abstract
Vice-good regulation is often designed to reduce harm by restricting access. Yet such restrictions may reorganize markets and behavior in ways that generate unintended spillovers. We examine this possibility in the context of online pornography. Beginning in 2023, 21 U.S. states implemented age-verification laws intended to protect minors from exposure to adult sexual content. In practice, these laws increased the effort and privacy costs of access for adults and prompted a major pornography platform to withdraw from states adopting the laws, creating a substantial restriction on product access. Using FBI crime data from 2,052 counties between 2022 and 2025, we exploit staggered policy implementation in a staggered difference-in-differences design, estimating counterfactual outcomes using partially pooled synthetic controls. We find that restricting access to the pornography market caused an increase in rape offenses recorded by law enforcement: during the first 12 months after implementation, incidents of rape were 2.5% higher in restricted counties than in their synthetic counterparts. This result is stable across alternative estimators, samples, time horizons, outcome measures, inference procedures, policy-confound exclusions, and placebo tests. The policy also increased juvenile-perpetrated rape, even though minors were the intended beneficiaries of the regulation. The findings show that policy-induced market reorganization for vice goods can trigger unintended behavioral responses with alarming welfare consequences.