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.

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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.

In sports betting markets, the pass-through and incidence of taxation depends on the tax base. An excise tax on wagers in Illinois passed through one-to-one to prices, but taxes on gaming revenues do not pass through to prices. Instead, narrative evidence suggests that firms respond to revenue taxes by reducing marketing expenditures. To understand how these reductions affect demand, we measure the causal effect of advertising on sports betting deposits using a border design. Our estimates imply that a policy that reduces local TV sportsbook advertising by 10% would reduce sports betting deposits by 1.75%. We discuss the policy implications of these facts, which depend on whether there are distortions in sports betting consumption, and on the characteristics of bettors who respond to prices versus marketing.