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Report
Sports Betting Across Borders: Spatial Spillovers, Credit Distress, and Fiscal Externalities
Since the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, 38 states have legalized mobile sports betting. We study effects on betting and consumer credit, emphasizing spatial spillovers across state lines. Using consumer spending data and an extended two-way fixed effects framework that separately identifies direct and spillover effects, we find that legalization increases total sportsbook spending roughly tenfold and take-up by 3.1 percentage points. Counties in non-legal states within 15 miles of a legal state experience spillover spending equal to roughly 14 percent of the direct effect, with these ...
Working Paper
Spatial Commitment Devices and Addictive Goods: Evidence from the Removal of Slot Machines from Bars
Commitment device theory suggests that temptations to consume addictive goods could be reduced by the regulatory removal of geographically close environmental cues. We provide new evidence on this hypothesis using a quasi-natural experiment, in which gambling regulators removed slot machines from some, but not all, neighborhood bars. We find that the removal of slot machines reduced personal bankruptcies of close neighbors (within 100 meters) but not neighbors slightly farther away. This is consistent with the removal of neighborhood slots serving as an effective spatial commitment device, ...