This series is adapted, with permission, from a Chinese-language series by our friend Marcus Ji, who looks at historical events through an economic lens. We have condensed and adapted the original for an international audience.
According to data cited by the US Certified Financial Planner Board, roughly a third of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy – most of them three to five years after winning. A peer-reviewed study of nearly 35,000 winners in Florida (Hankins, Hoekstra and Skiba, 2011) sharpened the finding into something stranger: medium-sized windfalls do not prevent bankruptcy, they merely postpone it – and three to five years out, the bigger winners were going bankrupt at higher rates than the small…