Matthew Brown

Corrective policy in sports betting markets is motivated by concerns that demand is driven by behavioral bias rather than a normative preference to gamble. We conduct a field experiment with frequent sports bettors to measure the impact of two biases, overoptimism about financial returns and self-control problems, on the demand for sports betting. We find widespread over-optimism about financial returns. The average participant predicts that they will break even, but in fact loses about 8 cents for every dollar wagered. Self-control problems are smaller and less common. We estimate a model of biased betting and use it to evaluate several corrective policies. Our estimates imply that the surplus-maximizing corrective excise tax on sports betting is twice as large as prevailing tax rates. We estimate substantial heterogeneity in bias across bettors, which implies that targeted interventions that directly eliminate bias could improve on a tax. However, implementation is challenging: we show that two bias-correction interventions favored by the gambling industry do not deliver the targeting improvements.

PDF survey instruments available for download. Qualtrics files are available on request.

• Survey 1
• Survey 2
• Survey 3

The consequences of online regulations depend on the extent to which users can circumvent restrictions or substitute toward noncompliant platforms. Since 2023, 25 U.S. states have implemented age verification laws that caused prominent adult websites (including Pornhub) to restrict local access for all users. We study how these restrictions affected browsing activity using individual-level panel data. Access restrictions reduced overall time spent on adult sites by roughly 10%. Specifically, for every 100 hours spent on top adult sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours were substituted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on adult sites.

Most U.S. states with legal sports betting tax sportsbook revenue. Since sportsbooks have minimal costs per dollar wagered, this ad valorem tax behaves like a profits tax, and sportsbooks do not raise the price of betting in high-tax states. Instead, they spend less on TV advertising. We estimate the causal effect of such advertising reductions on sportsbook deposits. We use our estimates to compare the ad valorem tax to a specific tax. The specific tax does raise the price of betting, so it discourages far more gambling. In a calibration incorporating standard tax burdens and internalities from sports betting, the specific tax’s corrective benefits do not outweigh its greater harms on consumers and firms: the marginal excess burden of the ad valorem tax is one-ninth that of a revenue-equivalent specific tax.

We present four facts about the role of political ideology in media coverage of 47,290 scientists using a novel and scalable measure of their political ideology. First, media outlets are more likely to cover scientific articles written by ideologically aligned scientists. Second, coverage decisions are strongly associated with non-ideological quality. The quality-coverage relationship is substantially stronger than the ideological alignment-coverage relationship. Third, the association between coverage and scientist ideology is stronger in fields of science where research engages with contemporary political debates, such as history and economics. Fourth, the political relevance of a field can change over time, as we demonstrate using a case study of research on the COVID-19 pandemic.