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Earl L. Grinols (1951-), American economist, political scientist, and author, currently works as Distinguished Professor of Economics at Baylor University. Known for contributions to the economics of gambling, Gambling in America: Costs and Benefit, and health care, Health Care for Us All: Getting More for Our Investment, his current research is on efficient intervention policies.

Grinols' citations by media and news outlets includes The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today and others. He has reviewed for numerous journals, presses, publications, and testified before Congress and many statehouses from Maine to Hawaii.

Biography
Grinols attended the University of Michigan where he was a James B. Angell scholar and received two summa cum laude degrees from the University of Minnesota in mathematics and economics. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.

Grinols has taught at or held positions with Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, MIT, the University of Illinois, and the Department of the Treasury in addition to Baylor University. He was Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisors in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

During his tenures at Cornell and Illinois, Grinols chaired each university’s faculty benefits committee. He also served in the university senate and other positions of responsibility. He was a founding member and first president of Illini Christian Faculty and Staff and served two terms as president of The Association of Christian Economists.

His current teaching is mathematics, public finance, and microeconomic theory at Baylor University.

In 1994 testimony, Grinols was one of the first academicians to recommend to Congress the formation of a national commission on gambling. The National Gambling Impact Study Commission was formed two years later in 1996, and issued its report, among other recommendations calling for a moratorium on the expansion of gambling in the United States in 1999.

In 2004 Grinols' third book, Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits, was published by Cambridge University Press. His work "Casinos, Crime, and Community Costs" studied all 3,165 counties in the United States for a twenty year period to establish statistical links between casinos and FBI Index I crime. Virtually no studies before or since have been as comprehensive in their data base.

In February of 2007, Grinols became somewhat of a celebrity in the Speech and Debate universe. The Public Forum Debate topic for that month was "Resolved: The costs of legalized casino gambling in the Unites States outweigh the benefits." Because of having a high score on Google's PageRank algorithm, Grinols' research was a favorite amongst debaters. Despite reaching anti-casino conclusions based on his own research, Grinols' work was used on both sides of the debate, a testament to his credibility some have surmised.

Research
Grinols' scholarly writings span topics in International Trade, Macroeconomics, Public Finance, Finance, Gambling, and Healthcare. He has published four books in addition to many articles in professional journals. Notable publications include:
1) The paper, "An Extension of the Kemp-Wan Theorem on the Formation of Customs Unions," resolved an unanswered open question by deriving the compensation formula guaranteeing welfare gains to any nation joining a customs union. Grinols’ compensations are always feasible. Furthermore, he showed that there exist situations in which they are the uniquely feasible compensations.

2) His paper, "Increasing Returns and the Gains from Trade," settled another open question by identifying conditions under which countries will gain from trade even in the presence of industries that exhibit increasing returns to scale.

3) A longstanding economic question was whether government should discount less highly for risk than a private firm or enterprise with some authors arguing for “one-sided rules” where social rates are always lower or equal to private discount rates. Grinols’ “Public Investment and Social Risk-Sharing,” showed that “the difference between the social value of a public project and its market value is determined by the social insurance value that the project has from improving risk-sharing relative to the market. Depending on the project and degree of market imperfection, this term can be positive, negative, or zero, explaining the different possibilities for the social evaluation of risk (p. 303).” In the special setting of the mean-variance model the analysis produces an intuitively appealing formula that is explained with reference to the space of risk spanned by marketed securities.

4) His book, Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits, demonstrates how to calculate properly the cost and benefits of introducing a new industry (not just gambling) into the economy.

5) His empirical paper, "Casinos, Crime, and Community Costs" (mentioned above) attracted great attention and was the first to use data from the entire country over a 20-year period.

6) His book, Health Care for Us All, jointly authored with colleague James W. Hendrson, appeared in 2009. It encourages pro-competitive legislative action such as most favored customer pricing, targeted intervention, and mechanisms to provide intentional control over national expenditures not generally contained in other proposals. Grinols has since come to admire the provisions often originating in the United States, but put into practice in Singapore.

Other contributions answer questions about rules of origin consistent with guaranteed gains from trade in free trade area formation, results that explain the valuation of assets for risk when they provide improvements in the set of risk sharing assets, investigations into replacing patents with more modern and efficient structures, trade policy applications, entitlement reform and health care.