Stumptown #1 by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth (2009)Interesting thing about Native American gambling enterprises: they may decrease demand for education.
This doesn't really have anything to do with the comic that I clipped above, but Stumptown did remind me of a fascinating paper I read by Will Evans about the impact of local labor market conditions on education enrollment:
Using restricted-use data from the 1990 and 2000 Census long-form, we analyze the impact of local labor market conditions on the demand for education using the economic shock produced by the opening of casinos on an Indian reservation as the identifying event. Federal legislation in 1988 allowed Indian tribes to open casinos in many states and since then, nearly 400 casinos have opened. We demonstrate that the opening of a casino increased the employment and wages of low-skilled workers. Young adults responded by dropping out of high school and reducing college enrollment rates, even though many tribes have generous college tuition subsidy programs.
Essentially, it seems that the opening of casinos has the negative unintended consequence of increasing the opportunity cost of education, particularly for low-skilled workers. This seems to outweigh any potential increase in educational attainment due to wealth effects (i.e. casinos increase family incomes, which should increase educational attainment) or due to the generous subsidies for college tuition that these casinos provide for tribe members.
It's an interesting read if you folks are into this sort of thing.
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