Native Americans living on reservations have historically been one of the poorest groups in the United States. In the late 1980s, a series of legal rulings and accompanying Federal legislation allowed tribes in some states to run casinos on reservations. As a result of these laws, about 200 of the 556 federally-recognized tribes run about 310 gaming centers, of which 220 are Las Vegas-style casinos with slot machines and/or table games. Given the large number of tribes that have embraced casino gaming as an economic development program, it is worth considering whether Indians on reservations have benefited from these operations. As the legal and legislative controversies surrounding tribal-owned gaming persist, the interest in this question continues to grow. The authors of this proposal are currently involved in the first nationwide evaluation of the social and economic impact of Native American-owned gaming operations on tribes and their surrounding communities. Using aggregate tribe-level data from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Evans and Topoleski demonstrate that on average, five years after a tribe opens a casino, reservation population increased 20 percent, employment rose by 55 percent, the employment to population ratio increased by 25 percent, and the percentage of workers living in poverty by a third. In this proposal, we outline a research program that uses restricted-use data from the 1990 and 2000 Census longform samples to examine the impact of gambling on people who live on or near reservations. The long-form samples are sent to one in six households and contain a wealth of social, demographic, and economic information about households and their members. Public-use versions of this data do not contain enough geographic detail to place households in particular tribes or on reservations, but detailed geographic data are available on restricted-use versions of the data set, available for use at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, a few miles from the University of Maryland Campus. Given the structure of most operations and the available data, we plan to investigate the following questions concerning the impact of gaming. What is the impact of Native American-owned gaming operations on the employment, wages, earnings, and incomes of those living on or near reservations? Who benefits most from gaming operations: Indians or non-Indians, males or females, high or low educated, established residents or new residents? As gaming operations have brought more money and jobs into tribes, has the historically poor housing stock on reservations improved? Has the rapid economic change on reservations generated by casinos changed family life through fertility, marriage, or divorce? Is educational attainment increasing as tribes use gaming profits to foster human capital accumulation?
