Men’s Classified Ads and Risky Health Behaviors

Hasan Shahid

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2026, vol. 116, 578-583

Abstract: Risky health behaviors are private and rarely observed. This paper introduces a novel dataset of over 170,000 men’s classified advertisements published between 1975 and 1992 in The Advocate, the largest and longest-running national LGBT magazine in the United States. Using high-frequency text data, this paper documents significant changes in the content of ads during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most notably a pronounced rise in the take-up of safe sex language following the first reports of AIDS. These findings offer rare insight into how perceived health risks shaped sexual behaviors during the very early years of the epidemic.

JEL-codes: D81 D91 I12 L82 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20261053

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