Betting on Jobs? The Employment Effects of Legal Sports Betting in the United States

Abstract

Thirty-four jurisdictions legalized sports betting after the Supreme Court's 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, creating a \$100 billion industry virtually overnight. Gambling industry employment did not budge. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design with the estimator and administrative payroll records covering every gambling worker in the United States, we estimate a precisely zero effect: the average treated state lost 198 jobs (SE: 236, $p = 0.40$, from Table~2). The null survives every specification we try—excluding COVID years, dropping concurrent iGaming states, sensitivity analysis under violations of parallel trends. Our design can rule out the 660 jobs per state that industry advocates promised. It finds nothing. Legal sports betting created revenue for operators and tax receipts for governments, but not the jobs that lawmakers were sold.