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Patterson also plans to buy a new horse trailer, a silver Corvette and renovate her home with the winnings, but overall she doesn’t plan to change her life in any extreme way.

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According to the findings, released this month, it seems that as the wealthy neighbour made flashy purchases, those around them followed suit. And the bigger the prize, the more likely neighbours in the postal code were to go broke. In fact, for each $1,000 a neighbour won, bankruptcies rose by 2.4%, the three co-authors wrote.

In those postal codes, residents who filed for bankruptcy after a neighbour won the lottery had significantly more “visible assets” compared to “invisible assets” — which means they brought products their neighbours could actually see, like cars or motorcycles, rather than pensions or stocks.

The study is part of a broader effort to dissect exactly what went wrong in the lead-up to the great recession of 2008. Observers have noted that before 2008, income inequality spiked and debt levels ballooned in lower-income households. So the study set out to prove how a widening income gap can lead to financial problems for poorer people.

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“As the rich are getting richer, maybe the poor are trying to do this thing called keeping up with the Joneses, which forces them into debt and then leads to financial problems,” study co-author and University of Alberta professor Barry Scholnick told the National Post.

Using a single lottery winner in a small neighbourhood, they were able to actually observe a “shock” to income inequality at a micro-level.

The study looked at more than 6,000 winners over 10 years in one Canadian province — which authors couldn’t name, because of a non-disclosure agreement. The prizes ranged from $1,000 to $150,000 between 2004 and 2014.

The authors were drawn to Canada for the study because data available here was “richer” than the U.S., and they could see what kind of assets neighbours had at the time they filed for bankruptcy.