https://voxeu.

org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

VOX  CEPR's Policy Portal

Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

Create account | Login | Subscribe

Search form

 Columns
o By Topic
o By Date
o By Reads
o By Tag
 Video Vox
 Vox Talks
 Publications
 People
 Debates
 Events
 About

Sports and child development

Christina Felfe, Michael Lechner, Andreas Steinmayr 04 November 2011

Does all work and no play make Jack a dumb boy as well as a dull one? This column presents
one of the first empirical studies on the effects of sporting activity on the cognitive ability of
children in Germany.

20

A
https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

Physical inactivity is a growing problem. It contributes to the obesity epidemic and is

particularly worrisome among the youngest in society. As a result, many countries have
programmes aimed at increasing the physical activity of children – the "Let's Move!" campaign
led by the US first lady, Michelle Obama, is a prominent example.

Folklore around the world tells us that physical activities are good for a child's development.
Moreover, many scientific studies have shown a positive association between the level of
physical activity and measures of children's health, skills, and wellbeing (Strong et al 2005). Yet,
empirical evidence, at least about the causal effect of physical activities on the non-health
outcomes, is scarce.

Our study (Felfe et al 2011) aims to fill this gap and to shed some light on the effect of sport
activities on smaller children's human-capital formation. Our results reveal that active sport club
participation leads to improvements in children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills, which are of
similar size to the ones found for largescale educational programmes.

So far, the economic literature has mainly focused on sport activities among adolescents. A
positive relationship between participation in high school sport and educational attainment, on
the one hand, and professional success, on the other, is well established (Barron et al 2000, Eide
and Ronan 2001, Pfeiffer and Cornelissen 2010, Stevenson 2010). Yet, the underlying
mechanism is not yet well understood. In particular, the question of when and through which
mechanism sport exerts its influence on people's educational and professional success remains
open.

When addressing this question it is crucial to bear in mind that cognitive and non-cognitive
abilities already acquired early in life are key determinants of success later in life (Heckman
2006). Thus, the focus of our study lies on sport participation during childhood. To be more
precise, we focus on participation in sport clubs among children aged three to ten years in
Germany. In Germany sport clubs are the key institutions organising sport activities of children.
According to the German Olympic Association (DOSB, Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund
2009), 76% of boys and 59% of girls aged seven to fourteen are playing sports in a club. This is
in stark contrast with the US, for example, where youth sport is much more organised by
schools. In Germany most child and youth sport , both for leisure and competition, is organised
in clubs. Schools play only a minor role.

Measuring the effect of sport during

childhood
https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

Our empirical analysis draws upon a cross-sectional (medical) survey for Germany, the German
Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS). This dataset
provides us not only with a wide array of children's cognitive and non-cognitive skill measures,
but also with detailed information on children's health, sport participation, and their family
background (5,632 children). Our main empirical approach is based on a matching estimation
strategy. The basic idea is that we compare the outcomes of children who participate in sport
with children who do not participate but are almost identical in other aspects, such as sex and
age, their parents’ education and income, their brothers and sisters, their parents’ parenting style,
or the characteristics of the neighbourhood they live in. As the KiGGS dataset contains a very
rich set of characteristics, especially regarding parenting style of parents, we can match children
on all-important observable characteristics.

Results
Our findings indicate strong positive effects of participation in sport on children's cognitive and
non-cognitive skills (see Table 1). We normalise our measures of children's skills to be zero on
average and have a standard deviation of one. In so doing we can interpret the size of the effects
in relationship to the general variation in children's skills (measured by one standard deviation
(henceforth, sd). Both cognitive skills, measured by overall school grades, and overall non-
cognitive skills improve by 0.13 sd. The latter effect is mainly driven by a reduction in emotional
problems (0.10 sd) and in peer problems (0.22 sd). The fact that children who engage in sport
also fare better in terms of health (0.12 sd) and general wellbeing (0.11 sd) support these
findings.

The size of the effects is in a similar range to the effects other studies find for largescale
educational programmes. Head Start for instance, one of the most studied educational
programmes in the US, has been shown to lead to improvements in children’s non-cognitive
skills of around 0.2 sd and in children’s cognitive skills of around 0.06 sd (Currie and Almond
2011).

Empirical challenges: Is the effect driven by

better parents or better children?
It is easy to cast into doubt whether our findings are driven by the fact that children, who are
more likely to engage in sport, are endowed with a priori better skills or stem from a more
advantaged family background. To the extent that these differences are unobserved, our
suggested empirical approach may fail to estimate the causal effect of sport participation on
children's development. In order to address these issues we pursue the following two alternative
strategies.
https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

 First, we take advantage of the panel dimension of a further dataset, the German Child
Panel. The longitudinal nature of this dataset allows us to match children on their initial
level of sport activity, skill endowment, and health conditions.
 Second, we exploit differences in the local availability of sport facilities. A better local
supply of sport facilities should lead to higher sport participation among children, but
should not be directly linked to an improvement in children's development (except via
increased sport participation). Thus, it acts as an exogenous shifter of children's sport
participation.

Discussion
Our results highlight the importance of physical activities for children's development.
Encouraging children to participate in sport and providing the necessary infrastructure should
therefore be, and in many countries already is, an important policy objective, although this
statement has to be qualified by a cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, our results provide evidence
that the positive effects of playing sports in a club are partially explained by an increase in
physical activity as sport club participation does not crowd out other sport activities. The effects
are strongest in cities, where children have fewer opportunities to be physically active outside of
sport clubs. One further explanation for our findings is a reduction in passive activities such as
watching TV. Nevertheless, ‘playing sports in a club’ has still many more dimensions, which,
given the data at hand, we are not able to explore. Participating in a sport club exposes children
to cooperation with other children in a team, which may also make them better team players in
other situations in life. Playing sports in a club comes often along with participation in
competitions. Victory in competition may raise children's self-esteem while defeat, despite
eventual negative effects on children’s self-esteem, may teach them how to deal with such a
situation. Future research should therefore try to dig deeper into the mechanisms through which
sport activities may influence skill formation and disentangle the various channels through which
the effect may work. 

Table 1. Matching estimates for the impact of sport on children's development

https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

References
Barron, J, B Ewing, and G Waddell (2000), “The Effects of High School Athletic Particpiation
on Education and Labor Market outcomes”, Review of Economics and Statistics, 82(3):409-421.

Currie, J, and D Almond (2011), “Human Capital Development before Age Five”, in O
Ashenfelter and D Card, Handbook of Labor Economics, 4(2):1315-1486.

DOSB, Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund (2009), Bestandsaufnahme 2009. Frankfurt/Main.

Eide, E and N Ronan (2001), “Is participation in high school athletics an investment or a
consumption good? Evidence from high school and beyond”, Economics of Education Review,
20(5):431-442.

Felfe, C, M Lechner and A Steinmayr (2011), “Sports and child development”, CEPR
Discussion Papers 8523.

Heckman, J (2006), “Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged

Children”, Science, 312(5782):1900-1902.
https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

Pfeiffer, C and T Cornelissen (2010), “The impact of participation in sports on educational

attainment - New evidence from Germany”, Economics of Education Review, 29(1):94-103.

Rees, D, and Sabia, J (2010). Sports participation and academic performance: Evidence from the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Economics of Education Review , 29 (5), pp.
751-759.

Stevenson, B (2010). Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High
School Sports. Review of Economics and Statistics , 92 (2), pp. 284-301.

Strong, WB, RM Malina, CJR Blimkie, SR Daniels, RK Dishman, B Gutin, AC Hergenroeder, A

Must, PA Nixon, JM Pivarnik, T Rowland, S Trost, F Trudeau (2005), “Evidence Based Physical
Activity for School-Age Youth”, The Journal of Pediatrics, 146(6):732-737.

20

Topics:  Education Frontiers of economic research Health economics

Tags:  Germany, sports, physical activity

52,143 reads

 Printer-friendly version

Christina Felfe

Assistant Professor, Universität St Gallen

https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

Michael Lechner

Professor and Chair of Econometrics, University of St. Gallen; and Research Fellow, CEPR

Andreas Steinmayr

Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Munich

Don't Miss

Trade agreements: Brexit and the way forward

Winters

Deepening EMU requires a coherent and well-sequenced package

Buti, Giudice, Leandro

Rethinking the macroeconomics of resource-rich countries: A new eBook

Arezki, Boucekkine, Frankel, Laksaci, van der Ploeg

Events

 Spring Meeting of Young Economists 2018

30 May - 1 June 2018 / Palma de Mallorca (Mallorca) - Spain / EAYE (European

Association of Young Economists) - University of the Balearic Islands
https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

 10th ECB Workshop on Forecasting Techniques: Economic Forecasting with Large

Datasets

18 - 19 June 2018 / European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, Germany / European

Central Bank

 ICSD 2018

12 - 13 September 2018 / Rome, Italy / European Center of Sustainable Development ,

CIT University

 7th MoFiR Workshop on Banking

14 - 15 June 2018 / Ancona, Italy / Money and Finance Research Group (MoFiR),
together with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and the Università
Politecnica delle Marche

 ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement 2018

16 - 17 May 2018 / London / The Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, the Office
for National Statistics and the Bank of England

CEPR Policy Research

 Discussion Papers(active tab)
 Insights

 Homeownership of immigrants in France: selection effects related to international

migration flows

Gobillon, Solignac

 Climate Change and Long-Run Discount Rates: Evidence from Real Estate

Giglio, Maggiori, Stroebel, Weber

 The Permanent Effects of Fiscal Consolidations

Summers, Fatás

 Demographics and the Secular Stagnation Hypothesis in Europe

Favero, Galasso

 QE and the Bank Lending Channel in the United Kingdom

https://voxeu.org/article/does-sport-make-your-kids-smarter-new-evidence-germany#tbl1

Butt, Churm, McMahon, Morotz, Schanz

Subscribe

 @VoxEU

 RSS Feeds

 Weekly Digest