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http://dx.doi.org/10.13106/jafeb.2021.vol8.no8.0149

A Causality Analysis of Lottery Gambling and Unemployment in Thailand  

KHANTHAVIT, Anya (Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy, Thammasat University)
Publication Information
The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business / v.8, no.8, 2021 , pp. 149-156 More about this Journal
Abstract
Gambling negatively affects the economy, and it brings unwanted financial, social, and health outcomes to gamblers. On the one hand, unemployment is argued to be a leading cause of gambling. On the other hand, gambling can cause unemployment in the second-order via gambling-induced poor health, falling productivity, and crime. In terms of significant effects, previous studies were able to establish an association, but not causality. The current study examines the time-sequence and contemporaneous causalities between lottery gambling and unemployment in Thailand. The Granger causality and directed acyclic graph (DAG) tests employ time-series data on gambling- and unemployment-related Google Trends indexes from January 2004 to April 2021 (208 monthly observations). These tests are based on the estimates from a vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Granger causality is a way to investigate causality between two variables in a time series. However, this approach cannot detect the contemporaneous causality among variables that occurred within the same period. The contemporaneous causal structure of gambling and unemployment was identified via the data-determined DAG approach. The use of time-series Google Trends indexes in gambling studies is new. Based on this data set, unemployment is found to contemporaneously cause gambling, whereas gambling Granger causes unemployment. The causalities are circular and last for four months.
Keywords
Betting; Directed Acyclic Graph; Google Trends; Granger Causality;
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