Earl Grinols (born 1951) is an American economist, political scientist, and author, currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Economics at Baylor University.
In 1994 testimony to Congress,[1] Grinols was one of the first academicians to recommend 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.