Since the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, 38 states have legalized mobile sports betting. We study effects on betting and consumer credit, emphasizing spatial spillovers across state lines. Using consumer spending data and an extended two-way fixed effects framework that separately identifies...

Governments frequently use lottery-like incentives to encourage socially desirable behavior ("Pigouvian lotteries"). We study lotteries that encourage retirement savings in a nationwide field experiment with over 380,000 participants in Colombia's public pension system. Lotteries increase...

We test whether a conditional cash lottery targets prevention on those doing too little because of inverse-S probability distortion that also causes overvaluation of a lottery. Consistent with theory, Filipinos perceiving their cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in a wide intermediate interval...

Multi-leg parlay bets have become hugely popular in the US despite loss rates on stakes that are four times higher than regular bets. This paper shows that even if bettors believe they have an edge, maximization of subjective expected utility requires placing separate bets when per-leg win...

Xiang et al. (2025) investigate whether the gambler's fallacy-the false belief that a random event is less likely to occur if it has occurred recently-is robust to using probabilistic (versus point) predictions and independently and identically distributed (versus non-IID) sequences. In five...

In this paper, we conduct a large-scale field experiment to investigate the manipulability of prediction markets. The main experiment involves randomly shocking prices across 817 separate markets; we then collect hourly price data to examine whether the effects of these shocks persist over time....

I study how access to foreign-born workers impacts firms and local economics in times of acute crisis. The 2020 H-2B visa lottery randomly gave some U.S. firms the chance to hire low-wage, migrant workers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using administrative data across three...

While sports betting markets share similarities with traditional financial markets, they are more accessible for empirical research thanks to availability of high-quality data, straightforward betting procedures, and the finite duration of events. As a result, they are often analyzed for market...

The gambler's ruin is usually presented as a repeated game where the gambler can either win or lose one unit. We examine cases where the profits from winning gambles are multiple times the stake at risk, with the expected profit per gamble being either zero, positive or negative. For positive...

Betting exchanges match people to take opposite sides of a bet. We present a model of a betting exchange in which participants disagree about outcome probabilities but are, on average, correct. Traders maximize subjective expected profits and equilibrium emerges from a simple matching process....

We analyze a market-wide panel dataset on retail options trading from India, a market with an 80% share in option contracts traded worldwide. Retail traders both concentrated in and dominate index options trading. They exhibit short-term speculative behavior with significant day trading, short-...

This study investigates the interplay between parental circumstances, talent, and luck in shaping long-term socioeconomic success through an agent-based simulation model. Building on prior research on the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) and parental circumstances on educational outcomes,...

Since 2021, Kalshi has operated as the only licensed prediction market in the United States. We show that Kalshi's contract prices are relatively accurate predictors of outcomes and their accuracy increases as markets come closer to closing. However, the prices also display a systematic...

We investigate whether better schools can compensate for the effects of children's genetic differences. To this end, we combine data from the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) with Norwegian register data to estimate the interaction between genetic endowments and school...