Cougar hunt backfires

Intrigued by headlines claiming cougars were on the prowl from Hollywood to New York, two University of Colorado Denver researchers recently went on the hunt, calculators loaded, to reveal if this stated phenomenon — that rich, older women were increasingly bagging young, sexy men — was fact or fiction. As it turned out, the numbers didn’t back the hoopla, at least not when it came to holy matrimony.

Despite heightened attention to age-gapped couples such as baby boomer Demi Moore and Generation-Xer Ashton Kutcher and scores of media accounts highlighting the “trend,” when the two economists scoured the…