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

We study the role of political ideology in the diffusion of scientific knowledge by media outlets. We document, using a novel measure of scientist ideology that spans more than 600,000 papers, that outlets are statistically significantly more likely to cover scientists with similar ideology. However, the role of scientist ideology is small in magnitude when compared to the role of scientific quality, as measured by academic citations, journal quality, and research funding, in media coverage of science. On average, outlets are more likely to cover high-quality research written by misaligned scientists than low-quality research written by ideologically aligned scientists.

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.