Summary:

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of community matching, one of the methods we will use to analyze the economic impacts of gaming venues in Massachusetts. Community matching involves selecting a group of communities that are economically and demographically similar to the casino host communities in Massachusetts. Once casinos open in Massachusetts, comparisons of data trends between the casino host communities and their matched control communities will provide a relative assessment of the impacts of casinos over time. Community matching is intended to complement other methods and enhance the overall assessment of the economic impacts of casinos. While a brief description of our methods is outlined below, the purpose and focus of this paper is to provide detail about the community matching method.