Opening a new casino in a county causes a significant drop in birth rates and prompts families with school-age children to move away.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
The Destruction of Social Capital and Family Flight: Evidence from Casino Openings
SSRN · 6408219
The Takeaway
While casinos are often marketed as engines for local growth, they appear to erode the 'social capital' of a community. The arrival of a casino leads to a documented decline in public school populations and religious participation, effectively pushing out the institutions that support family life.
From the abstract
IN PROGRESS, DO NOT CITE: Casino development is often promoted as an engine of local economic growth, but its broader social consequences remain less understood. This paper investigates how casino openings reshape demographic patterns and family-supporting institutions in U.S. counties from 2003 to 2023. Exploiting staggered treatment timing in a difference-indifferences framework, we document consistent evidence that casinos erode community structures. We estimate an 0.90 and 1.10 percentage po