Taylor Swift For VP In 2024

Taylor Swift will be 35 years old in January of 2025. She is just old enough to be the VP in President Biden's 2024 Presidential election campaign.

She would make the ticket more electable, would be great on the campaign trail, and honestly, if called upon to serve as President, would probably do a good job.

Priests v. Same Sex Marriage

There is suggestive evidence that one in six Catholic priests in the U.S. is gay.

We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests’ vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differences-in-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to be driving our results, since we find no effect on enrollment in deacon or lay ministry studies that do not require celibacy. We also find that coming out decisions, as inferred through enrollment in priestly studies, are primarily affected by the presence of gay communities and by prevailing social attitudes toward gays. We explain our findings with a stylized model of lifestyle choice.

Avner Seror and Tohit Ticku, "Legalized Same-Sex Marriage and Coming Out in America: Evidence from Catholic Seminaries" ESI Working Paper 21-07 (2021).