The figure that follows online sports betting around is that legalizing it drove bankruptcy filings up 25% to 30%. The researchers behind it no longer say that. In the July 2024 draft of “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling,” Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio put the increase at roughly 27%. In the April 2025 version of the same paper, they put it at roughly 10%, which they translate as about nine additional filings per 100,000 people, or, in their words, “about 7,000 more bankruptcies a quarter, or roughly 30,000 more bankruptcies a year.”
That is still a large number of people. It is also about a third of the figure that has been circulating, and the correction has gone almost entirely unreported while the original keeps being quoted.
