The effect of gambling on crime: evidence from the Czech Republic

The focus of this thesis is to examine the relationship between gambling and crime in the Czech environment, where gambling is broadly available. Data about the individual gambling machines and tables together with the data about offenses in particular police districts were used in order to estimate the effect of gambling on crime. The final dataset observes 388 geographical units over the life span between April 2013 and December 2015. The study employs three estimation techniques the OLS, Poisson regression and Negative binomial regression to estimate the effect of gambling on crime. The main variable representing the size of gambling is the number of slot machines as these are the most broadly available type of gambling. The final estimated relationship between crime and slot machines is that one additional slot machine is associated with an increase in crime by 0.3-0.5% depending on the method and frequency. On the contrary, the effect of casino games, electromechanical roulettes, and dice devices on crime was found to be statistically insignificant. In addition, the study also analyses particular types of crimes, finding that gambling has an impact particularly on crimes that involve material benefits as opposed to the violent crimes. Moreover, it also conducts a what-if analysis demonstrating the estimated impact of reduction of gambling on the substantial drop of the number of offenses over the observed period was rather limited and account for 937 offenses.