Poverty and economic behavior: gambling on social security paydays

Momi Dahan

International Gambling Studies, 2021, vol. 21, issue 1, 38-58

Abstract: The goal of this research is to explore whether actual lottery revenues are sensitive to economic scarcity, as measured by intra-monthly stock of financial resources. Paydays of social security benefits are employed in this study to generate the various degrees of intra-monthly scarcity in financial resources. Using two million observations on daily lottery revenues that cover more than 2,500 lottery outlets in Israel over two years (2015–2016), the empirical analysis suggests that gambling revenue spikes at social security paydays. The estimation results imply that on income support payday aggregate lottery revenues are higher by 5% after taking into account potential determinants of gambling such as day of week, holidays and outlet characteristics. However, the calculated aggregate reaction of lottery revenues on income support payday is quite small and equals 0.5% of the total monthly payments deposited into the bank accounts of income support recipients. In addition, the other social security and salary paydays induce a trivial impact, relative to total monthly payments deposited into the bank accounts of the respective recipients. The findings presented here provide a valuable contribution to gambling studies that examine the relationship between economic conditions and lottery.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14459795.2020.1792962 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Poverty and Economic Behavior: Gambling at Social Security Paydays (2019)
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:taf:intgms:v:21:y:2021:i:1:p:38-58

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RIGS20

DOI: 10.1080/14459795.2020.1792962

Access Statistics for this article

International Gambling Studies is currently edited by Katie Donnelly, David Marshall, Bronwyn Stuart, Alex Blaszczynski and Jan McMillen

More articles in International Gambling Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().