A Penn professor received a grant to examine the impact of sports betting on public health and social outcomes.
The grant was awarded to Perelman School of Medicine professor David Powell by Arnold Ventures. The philanthropy company granted $2.6 million across 12 research projects.
Arnold Ventures grouped the projects into four categories: Advancing Evidence on Consumer Behavior and Risk, Understanding Financial and Household Impacts, Evaluating Public Health and Social Outcomes, and Informing State Policy and Revenue Considerations. Powell’s work falls under Evaluating Public Health and Social Problems.
His research focuses on whether legalizing sports betting is tied to changes in state suicide rates. The project will run from 2026 to 2028 and uses a “staggered difference-in-differences design to isolate causal effects over time,” according to the Arnold Ventures release.
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Powell said he is drawn to public health outcomes because they “tell you more about how a policy is affecting individual well-being than standard economic outcomes.”
“We know a little bit about how sports betting is impacting people financially,” he added. “We know less about the broader outcomes associated with that.”
According to Powell, sports betting is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. While he didn’t “personally have an opinion” on the matter, he said that the process of legalizing sports betting is “very fast moving without much evidence.” As such, he said, it was “important to document” whether there was a relationship between suicide rates and legalization.
“When a policy starts getting adopted this quickly, you would hope that there would be a good evidence base behind it, and it’s surprising that there’s just not much of evidence base,” he added.
Powell characterized rates of sports betting as “an interesting proxy” for “financial and economic hardship.”
“We are kind of in this suicide crisis right now,” he said. “I don’t think sports betting is driving that, but trying to understand the underlying factors that are impacting suicide rates is really important.”
“There is some thought about, like, ‘Should we be scaling this back? Should we be regulating this more?’ A lot of my work will be focused on trying to understand who this impacts, if anyone,” he said.
Powell plans to examine suicide rates by age, sex, education, and race to determine specific markers within the data. He said that his interest in public health outcomes stems from prior work on the opioid crisis and legalized addictive behaviors.
Alongside Powell, researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center will examine mental health diagnoses in relation to sports betting legalization, while researchers from Indiana University will examine how sports betting affects behavioral health care spending.
