Risk management in the shadow economy: Evidence from the sport betting market

Robert Arscott

Journal of Corporate Finance, 2022, vol. 77, issue C

Abstract: I use the market for college football point spread gambling as a laboratory for assessing risk management activity among illegal firms. Offshore bookmakers employ pricing policies that reflect a book balancing objective whereas legal bookmakers seldom do so. Pricing policies that prioritize book balance lower the variance of bookmakers’ expected cash flow, but at the cost of lower profit. Due to the legal and moral hazards involved in operating an illegal enterprise, these firms rely on internal financing. Consequently, illegal bookmakers behave as mean–variance optimizers as opposed to legal bookmakers who appear to behave as profit maximizers.

Keywords: Risk management; Underground economy; Gambling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 K42 L83 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092911992200150X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:corfin:v:77:y:2022:i:c:s092911992200150x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2022.102307

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Corporate Finance is currently edited by A. Poulsen and J. Netter

More articles in Journal of Corporate Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().