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A questionnaire was mailed to winners in the lottery requesting information on income and number of lottery tickets purchased. The number of tickets purchased was regressed against income. The results reveal that the lottery is highly regressive as far as the subset of the population who buys tickets is concerned. Next, the hypothesis that the subset of winners is a representative sample of the population of the state was tested and rejected. Finally, analysis based on a Lorenz curve suggests that the lottery tax is regressive for most of the income range except for persons in the income category below 4000 per year.
M. Spiro (Fri,) studied this question.