Gambling, Saving and Lumpy Liquidity Needs - A Reproducibility and Replicability Assessment of Herskowitz (2021)

Herskowitz (2021) investigates the relationship between unmet liquidity needs and the demand for gambling among sports bettors in Kampala, Uganda, using a combination of surveys, randomized field experiments, and lab-in-the-field experiments. The study finds that unmet liquidity needs drive gambling behavior, and financial interventions like providing savings mechanisms can reduce the demand for gambling. In this comment, we first successfully conduct a computational reproduction. Second, we conduct a number of robustness checks to check the robustness of the five main outcomes. The findings that anticipated expenditures increase targeted gambling payouts and that a randomized savings treatment reduces betting demand are robust to all analytical choices considered, although the latter remains statistically significant only at the 10% level used in the original paper. The finding that gambling winnings disproportionately increase lumpy expenditures is more sensitive: removing control variables renders the effect statistically insignificant, while alternative outlier treatment does not materially affect it. The two findings concerning the mechanisms underlying gambling demand are largely robust across specifications, although correcting two coding discrepancies reduces their statistical significance. Overall, the original results were found to be largely robust, supporting the paper's main conclusions.