More than Chance: The Local Labor Market Effects of Tribal Gaming

I also thank participants at the NBER Conference on the Economics of Indigenous Peoples and Institutions and the APPAM and MEA meetings; and participants of seminars and workshops at Duke University, the CES, the University of Calgary, Montana State University, the University of Alberta, Rollins College, LISER, Sacramento State University, Colby College, the CICD, the University of Saskatchewan, a. [...] The comparison between tribal gaming and the North American bison highlights the importance of the gaming industry to the prosperity of Native communities. [...] It includes the name of the casino, the year it opened, the geographic coordinates, and two measures of size: the number of slot machines and square footage. [...] The average distance from the reservation to the nearest urban area is 23.58 kilometers for reservations that opened a casino between 1988 and 2013 and 32.61 km for reservations that did not.37 The variable β identifies the average effect of casino adoption for reservations with casinos under the identifying assumption known as the parallel trends assumption. [...] These findings suggest that Figure 5 masks important heterogeneity in casino effects over the post-adoption years.53 5.2 The Housing Market In line with the predictions of the standard spatial equilibrium models, I find evidence that tribal casinos affect the housing markets on the reservations where the casinos open.