UMass Donahue Institute

Through the establishment of the gambling industry in Massachusetts, lawmakers provided avenues for the creation of new jobs, revenue, and economic growth in the state. The Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts (SEIGMA) project, of which the Economic and Public Policy Research (EPPR) unit at the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute (UMDI) is a part, strives to understand the impact of the casinos on the people and economy of the Commonwealth.

The purpose of this report is to catalog as accurately as possible the ways in which the Massachusetts economy has been changed by the legalization of sports betting. Legalization introduced three retail sports betting operators, operating within the three existing casino locations, and nine mobile or online sports betting operators1 into the Commonwealth’s gambling industry. Understanding how the introduction of these operators affects the economy involves analyzing the impacts of multiple parts of these operations, namely, operating impacts such as employment and spending to other businesses, gross gaming revenues, and consumer spending patterns. Taken together, these measures of economic activity can be quantified and used as inputs to inform the SEIGMA team’s REMI PI+ economic model. The output from this model allows us to capture the “ripple effects” that are caused by these direct impacts and therefore make conclusions about the total impacts of these changes on the Massachusetts economy.

Click below to see the report. Click here to review the report "snapshot".