Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Las Vegas Strip Gaming Revenue

Abstract

The coronavirus epidemic or Covid-19 started in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has severely impacted all aspects of life worldwide. It has resulted in 216 million infections and 4.5 million deaths so far globally, and  In the present article, the impact of coronavirus on gaming revenue of the state of Nevada will be investigated. Gaming revenue time series data for the period January 1988 – November 2020 was obtained from the Gaming Control Board of Nevada. In addition to the trend and seasonality components, the terrorist attack of September 2011, the recession of 2008, and the coronavirus pandemic are also included in the Machine Learning (ML) prediction models for gaming revenues. The goals of this study are to estimate the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on gaming revenue of the Las Vegas Strip casinos, and to forecast gaming revenue and predict time to recovery. The results of this analysis show that the impact of coronavirus has been drastic, but the economic recovery has been rather fast.