Abstract of thesis entitled “The Effect of Economic Recession on Casino Revenue, Evidences from Las Vegas and Macau”, submitted by Chen Baoyu (M-B0-5635-7) for the degree of master of Social Science in Economics at the University of Macau in July 2012. “Casino industry has been considered as recession proof” 1 . It was believed that a person would like to go to gamble regardless of the country’s economic state. Thus, it was reasonable to consider that the casino industry was largely unaffected during the economic recession. However, the global financial crisis around 2008 seems shake this belief and the recent researches highlighted that the influence of macro-economic factors on casino revenue should be taken into consideration. This thesis examines the relationship between economic recession and casino revenue in Las Vegas and Macau respectively over the periods of 2000 to 2012. Ordinary least-squares (OLS) analysis is used in this thesis. I focus my analysis to the impact of gaming factors and non-gaming factors on casino revenues in both two markets. The empirical evidence shows a generally negative relationship between economic recession 2008 and casino revenue in both places, and supports the theory that casino is no longer recession proof by Legg &Tang (2010). The results also show 1 Linn, A. (2010), “Recession-proof? Maybe not this time” MSNBC News. 2 that the significant negative effect of economic recession around 2008 on casino revenue is larger in Las Vegas than in Macau, which suggests that Las Vegas’s casinos suffered more in this economic recession. Moreover, through considering the interactive terms of the gaming and non-gaming factors with dummy variable (REC08) in the model respectively, the results show that non-gaming factors are more sensitive to economic conditions than gaming factors, and this explains why casino industry in Las Vegas suffered more in the global financial crisis around 2008 than Macau. At the end of the paper, some suggestions on the diversification of Macau are given.