Research

Policymakers have been quick to legalize access to online sports gambling (OSG) platforms: 30 states and the District of Columbia now have some form of OSG. We assess the state fiscal benefits of this policy by examining how OSG impacts demand for state lotteries, an alternative gambling market and a crucial source of funding for public programs. Leveraging the staggered adoption of OSG across states, we analyze changes in lottery demand using a county-level lottery sales dataset across 17 states plus DC and a separate transaction-level dataset covering 80% of all independent convenience stores in all 50 US states. We find consistent evidence that OSG significantly reduces state lottery demand, with sales declining by 5.4% to 6.2% in the 16 months following implementation. Because of reduced demand and the initial sports gambling tax policy, our set of 17 states plus DC incurred a cumulative loss of $148 million in state revenue following OSG implementation. Analysis of individual states shows that early adopters (New Jersey and Pennsylvania) experience significant revenue losses, while most other states break even. Reduced demand is likely due to lower lottery purchasing intensity, as consumers shift a larger share of their budgets toward OSG. For state policymakers, these results challenge the notion that OSG is a fiscal windfall.

When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, it brought significant changes to the landscape of reproductive rights and digital privacy. This study investigates how heightened concerns over government surveillance and data privacy, prompted by this ruling, affect the usage of digital health tracking tools. Using a panel of mobile phone usage data, we analyze user behavior before and after the Dobbs ruling leaked. We find a significant chilling effect on the usage of mobile health apps: an 8.8% decrease in weekly app sessions and a 23.7% reduction in average time spent on mobile health apps immediately after the leak. The reduction is larger for FemTech apps, with a 15.7% decline in sessions and a 40% reduction in weekly time spent. These effects are moderated by prior exposure to social media, state-level policies, and demographic factors such as age and income. We also observe spillover effects in the form of increased adoption of privacy-preserving browsers following the leak.

Vice-good regulation is often designed to reduce harm by restricting access. Yet such restrictions may reorganize markets and behavior in ways that generate unintended spillovers. We examine this possibility in the context of online pornography. Beginning in 2023, 21 U.S. states implemented age-verification laws intended to protect minors from exposure to adult sexual content. In practice, these laws increased the effort and privacy costs of access for adults and prompted a major pornography platform to withdraw from states adopting the laws, creating a substantial restriction on product access. Using FBI crime data from 2,052 counties between 2022 and 2025, we exploit staggered policy implementation in a staggered difference-in-differences design, estimating counterfactual outcomes using partially pooled synthetic controls. We find that restricting access to the pornography market caused an increase in rape offenses recorded by law enforcement: during the first 12 months after implementation, incidents of rape were 2.5% higher in restricted counties than in their synthetic counterparts. This result is stable across alternative estimators, samples, time horizons, outcome measures, inference procedures, policy-confound exclusions, and placebo tests. The policy also increased juvenile-perpetrated rape, even though minors were the intended beneficiaries of the regulation. The findings show that policy-induced market reorganization for vice goods can trigger unintended behavioral responses with alarming welfare consequences.

Consumers increasingly use generative AI tools for advice and social support, raising a broader question for marketing: how does AI affect participation in markets built around human connection? We examine this question in the context of dating apps. The effect of AI adoption on dating-app use is ambiguous. AI may increase dating-app use by helping consumers communicate more effectively; have little effect because dating apps provide access to real romantic and sexual partners; or decrease use by satisfying some of the social and emotional needs that motivate consumers to use dating apps. Using longitudinal smartphone app-usage data from 2022 to 2024, we exploit staggered adoption timing among dating-app users who eventually adopt AI apps, with not-yet-treated adopters serving as the comparison group. AI-app use causes a decline in dating-app use: minutes used decline by 54% and app opens decline by 62%. Survey evidence suggests the reduction extends to in-person dating and is strongest among consumers who use AI for emotional support; among those who experience dating apps as laborious; and among those with weaker physical or casual dating goals. These findings suggest that AI may shape not only how consumers participate in markets, but whether they participate at all.

Governments worldwide ban advertising of harmful products to protect public health, but the health effects of those bans are largely unknown. Here we measure the long-term mortality effects of cigarette advertising bans in ten countries. These bans differed in whether they also withdrew mandated risk disclosures. We examine the USA in the most detail, where the 1971 broadcast ban inadvertently reduced the anti-smoking advertisements required since 1967. Two national surveys show increased smoking among Americans who were teenagers after the 1971 ban. The smoking increase was larger in nonmetropolitan counties with stronger predicted television reception, suggesting the loss of anti-smoking advertisements as a mechanism. Using a cancer registry, we show that the same generation of teenagers were more likely to develop lung and laryngeal cancer. Using three death registries, we estimate that the ban caused 71,000 to 102,000 additional deaths from lung cancer, laryngeal cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. International comparisons show that deaths from smoking increased where cigarette advertising and risk disclosures ended together and decreased where advertising ended without that loss. Similar regulations today for prescription drug advertising in the USA and gambling advertising in Australia face losing a mandated risk disclosure, just as the USA did in 1971.