The purpose of this study was to examine whether a land-based gambling ban has an impact on crime in the Czech Republic. The researchers used the synthetic control method in this study. In this method, there is at least one treated unit and a control group that is created as a weighted average of several untreated units. The treated group for this study included four cities in Czech Republic that banned land-based gambling during or after 2017. The untreated group included 11 cities that do not currently have a ban in place and had land-based games in operation from 2013 to 2021. Using a crime index which included updated data on crime every 6 months, the researchers obtained 17 observations for each city. The researchers divided the observations into a pre-treatment period (up to the beginning of 2017) and a post-treatment period.
By using the synthetic control method, a close match could be established between the three treated cities and the control cities in the pre-treatment period. The researchers found that all treated cities had about the same crime rate as they would have without the ban. These cities had roughly the same crime rate after they introduced a land-based gambling ban as the control cities without a ban. Thus, a land-based gambling ban appeared to have no effect on crime rate.
