Insights from a new BU-led study on legalized sports and casino gambling in Massachusetts may be used to inform changes to regulations or programs. Photo by Amanda Jones/Unsplash

Gambling

Boston University Researchers to Examine Impact of Legalized Gambling in $2.5M Study

Funding from Massachusetts Gaming Commission will drive research on social and economic impacts, including student behavior

You can’t turn on the TV or drive down the highway without seeing an ad for DraftKings, FanDuel, or one of the other apps that have been raking in gamblers’ cash since Massachusetts legalized sports betting three years ago. 

Now, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission has awarded researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health a $2.5 million contract for a far-reaching, three-year study of the social and economic effects of legalized sports and casino gambling in the state.

The spread of sports betting apps, problem gambling, and the community impact of casinos are major topics of the study—the funding for which was awarded to a research team from SPH’s Department of Health Law, Policy & Management (HLPM). The study’s answers may offer insights that can be used to inform changes to regulations or programs.

Massachusetts legalized casino gambling in 2011 and retail and online sports betting in 2022. The state’s three casinos, in Everett, Springfield, and Plainville, generated $95.69 million in gaming revenue in September—the last month for which statistics are available—while online sports betting revenue totaled $52.34 million. As of March, the commonwealth had collected more than $2 billion in taxes and assessments from casinos and more than $339 million from sports betting since they were legalized.

But widening legalization of gaming “brings challenges that we don’t fully understand the scope of yet,” says Christopher J. Louis, SPH clinical professor and associate chair of HLPM. He is the study’s primary investigator.

“Anytime you make a vice into something that creates new tax revenue for states, you have to study it to understand the unintended consequences,” including social and financial fallout from problem gambling, Louis says. “That’s the moment that we’re in now.” 

The blizzard of ads for casinos and sports betting on TV, billboards, and social media is one focus of the study.

“Is it actually reaching the groups that we want, or is it spilling over into youth?” says Louis, an expert in evaluating large-scale programs. “You drive down I-93 and you see a DraftKings billboard. What does my 12-year-old recognize with that?”

Learning how college students are betting on sports and how it affects them is another key aim of the study, an effort led by Sarah K. Lipson, an SPH associate professor in HLPM and an expert in adolescent and young adult mental health.

The new study, Lipson says, is an important opportunity “to see how student gambling relates to all the outcomes that I’ve cared about throughout my career: mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety, social outcomes like loneliness and belonging, and academic outcomes like their performance in school and their likelihood to persist to graduation.” 

Lipson is a principal investigator for the Healthy Minds Network, which produces a respected national study of adolescent and young adult mental health that the gambling study will leverage. 

The 2024–25 Healthy Minds Study found 11.1 percent of college students nationally reported sports betting, says Lipson, and 22.1 percent of those said they struggled to set limits on how much they bet. According to Louis, while 21 is the minimum age for legal gambling in Massachusetts, underage sports betting via apps appears common.

“It’s a time of newfound independence,” Lipson says. “For many people, it’s the first time that they’re living away from home, that they’re the ones making decisions about all sorts of health behaviors, including their finances. And then we know that sports betting and gambling is just really pervasive and very accessible, and it’s hard to avoid. There’s this huge gap in research around the prevalence and how this behavior is affecting other parts of their lives.”

The new gambling study has six primary aims, each to be led by different SPH associate professors in HLPM:

• Conduct a survey of up to 6,000 Massachusetts residents—through the California-based national survey firm Verasight—to assess attitudes toward sports betting and casino gambling, actual gaming behavior, and the extent of problem gambling. This will provide the data for much of the study. Led by Timothy Callaghan.
• The focus on college students led by Lipson.
• Measure gambling advertising exposure and assess its effect on problem gambling. Led by Matthew Motta and Jennifer Ross.
• Assess the effect of gaming on employment, income, spending, and other measures, by city and county, including casino host cities. Co-led by Justin White and Paul Shafer.
• Investigate the impacts of casinos on county-level employment and wages and municipal government revenue and expenditures. Led by Shafer.
• Study the relationship between sports wagering and financial well-being and social needs for nongamblers, recreational gamblers, and problem gamblers alike. Led by White.

“It’s getting evidence, understanding trends,” Louis says. “Understanding that the rate of problem gambling [that existed] before sports betting is likely to go up because of the access that people have.”

Also involved in the project are an advisory board of experts from inside and outside BU. Project management will be provided by Boston-based Health Co-Lab, a service-disabled veteran-owned business, which will also create a public dashboard to disseminate the results in year three.

The gaming commission, which regulates the industry in the state, has an ongoing research agenda as required by its establishing legislation; more than 80 papers have been published since 2013 as a result, says Mark Vander Linden, director of research and responsible gaming for the commission.

“The expertise that BU brought, the talent pool, the fresh ideas were quite impressive to us,” Vander Linden says. “The ability to tie into the Healthy Minds Study is an exceptional value to the gaming commission, which we believe will provide us with invaluable information about gambling in college-age students. They are a high-risk group, as we know, and we want a better understanding of this group and how we can be as effective as possible at mitigating harm.”

Vander Linden says the study needs to advance existing knowledge about the prevalence of problem gambling in Massachusetts and what groups are at risk, as the scene is changing rapidly, with the rise of sports betting apps and in-game betting, among other changes.

“Massachusetts has said we want to understand what are the trends, what’s happening, and how we need to adapt,” says Louis. “And I think that’s something that they should be given a lot of credit for.”