The economics of sport, health and happiness: the promotion of well-being through sporting activities

Sport Participation and Subjective Well-Being: Instrumental Variable Results From German Survey Data

“…Some studies of the effect of sport participation on happiness include self-reported health status as a covariate in the happiness equation. 10,19,26 In all cases, the coefficients are positive and significant. However, simply including some health status measure in the happiness equation without accounting for the endogeneity of health status is suggestive of only an association between health and happiness.…”

“…The distance to the nearest sports facility serves as a proxy for access to these facilities. Similar instruments have been used by Forrest and McHale 26 and Huang and Humphreys 11 to identify participation in physical activity in happiness regressions using IV. Following Stock and Yogo, 27 an F-test from an OLS regression with P i as the dependent variable and only the vector Z i as explanatory variables is used to assess the strength of the instruments.…”

Does Sport Affect Health and Well-Being or Is It the Other Way Around? A Note on Reverse-Causality in Empirical Applications

“…The most common type of instrument is some sport access indicators such as the presence of sport facilities nearby. This strategy was adopted, for example, in Forrest and McHale (2011), Ruseski et al (2014), Frick (2015, 2016), Downward and Dawson (2016), Brechot et al (2017), and dos Santos et al (2019). There are other examples of more original instrumental variables that account for sports supply.…”

“…There are other examples of more original instrumental variables that account for sports supply. Thus, Forrest and McHale (2011) consider parental encouragement to play sport during childhood, Sarma et al (2015) and Downward and Dawson (2016) temperature and month of the year respectively, Wicker and Frick (2015, 2016) club membership and Ruseski et al (2014) beliefs about the importance of sport participation. The different approaches and instruments used in these papers are not aseptic as these methodologies are based on untestable assumptions.…”

Optimization in Sports League Scheduling: Experiences from the Belgian Pro League Soccer

“…Apart from the purely economic impact, sports is also relevant for society because of its contribution to well-being in general. Indeed, according to Forrest and McHale [19], the impact of sports on happiness scores collected from nearly 28,000 adults in the UK turned out to be comparable with the impact of having a job.…”