Economics Seminar - "Impacts of Access to Legal Mobile Sports Betting on Self-Reported Mental Health: Evidence from Household Pulse Survey"

In this paper, we utilize data from the Household Pulse Survey to estimate the impacts of legal access to online betting markets on self-reported mental health status and financial distress by exploiting the staggered timing of legalization across U.S. states. We estimate access to legal betting is associated with no average population-wide impacts on either self-reported measure, and do not find evidence for any heterogenous impacts in demographic groups most likely to bet on sports. Our methodology uses predicted counterfactual outcomes estimated using only the group of states that have not yet been treated to provide plausibly causal estimates of the impacts of access to sports betting. These results contradict the popular narrative of widespread mental harms associated with access to sports betting at the population average level, and provide important and timely evidence to an ongoing policy debate regarding the costs
and benefits associated with legal sports betting.