The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
研究了美国最高法院2018年裁决后各州体育赌博合法化对消费者信用评分和负债的影响，发现线上赌博使平均信用评分下降约12分，并增加破产等过度负债指标。对关注消费者金融健康和政策影响的研究者有参考价值。
Following a 2018 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, 39 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports gambling. We study how this policy has impacted consumer financial health using the University of California Consumer Credit Panel, which contains credit report data for a representative sample of roughly 7 million U.S. consumers. Exploiting the staggered rollout of legal sports betting across states, we evaluate two treatment effects: the overall effect of any legal sports betting (General Access) and the incremental effect of introducing online or mobile betting in states that already offer retail betting (Retail-to-Online Access). We find that General Access is associated with a modest decline in average credit scores (0.7 points), whereas the introduction of online sports gambling leads to a substantially larger decline (about 12 points). These credit score declines are associated with increases in indicators of excessive debt, including bankruptcy filings, debt sent to collections, credit card delinquencies, and auto loan delinquencies. Together, our results indicate that the ease of access to sports gambling—particularly through online and mobile channels—harms consumer financial health by increasing levels of excessive debt. This paper was accepted by Jean-Pierre Dube, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by the UCLA Briskin Fund. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.02515 .