In contrast to the popular policy claim that sport might serve as vehicle to meet the Millennium Development Goals, empirical evidence based on large-scale survey data is largely missing. We use panel data based on a cohort of children and employ propensity score matching to identify the effects of sports participation on child development in Peru. Our findings suggest that participation in a sports group has positive impacts on subjective health and a measure of social capital. However, and in contrast to developed countries, we find no statistically significant effects on well-being and human capital formation.
AbadieA.ImbensG. W. (2008). On the failure of the bootstrap for matching estimators. Econometrica, 76, 1537–1557.
2.
AldermanH. (2010). The economic cost of a poor start to life. Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, 1, 19–25.
3.
BarronJ. M.EwingB. T.WadellG. R. (2000). The effects of high school athletic participation on education and labour market outcomes. Review of Economics and Statistics, 82, 409–421.
4.
BeckerG. S. (1962). Investment in human capital: A theoretical analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 70, 9–49.
5.
BornsteinM. H.Rebello BrittoP.Nonoyama-TarumiY.OtaY.PetrovicO.PutnickD. L. (2012). Child development in developing countries: Introduction and methods. Child Development, 83, 16–31.
6.
CaballeroB. (2005). A nutrition paradox—Underweight and obesity in developing countries. The New England Journal of Medicine, 352, 1514–1516.
7.
CabaneC.LechnerM. (2015). Physical activity of adults: A survey of correlates, determinants, and effects. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik (Journal of Economics and Statistics), 235, 376–402.
8.
CantrilH. (1965). The pattern of human concerns. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.
CrookstonB. T.DeardenK. A.AlderS. C.PorucznikC. A.StanfordJ. B.MerrillR. M.…PennyM. E. (2011). Impact of early and concurrent stunting on cognition. Maternal and Child Nutrition, 7, 397–409.
DehejiaR. H.WahbaS. (2002). Propensity-score-matching methods for none experimental causal studies. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 84, 151–161.
13.
DownwardP.HallmannK.PawlowskiT. (2014). Assessing parental impact on the sports participation of children: A socio-economic analysis of the UK. European Journal of Sport Science, 14, 84–90.
14.
DownwardP.PawlowskiT.RasciuteS. (2014). Does associational behaviour raise social capital? A cross-country analysis of trust. Eastern Economic Journal, 40, 150–165.
15.
DownwardP.RiordanJ. (2007). Social interactions and the demand for sport: An economic analysis. Contemporary Economic Policy, 25, 518–537.
16.
EcclesJ. S.BarberB. L.StoneM.HuntJ. (2003). Extracurricular Activities and adolescent development. Journal of Social Issues, 59, 865–889.
17.
EideE. R.RonanN. (2001). Is participation in high school athletics an investment or a consumption good? Evidence from high school and beyond. Economics of Education Review, 20, 431–442.
18.
FelfeC.LechnerM.SteinmayrA. (2016). Sports and child development. PLoS One, 11, e0151729.
19.
GerlachE.BrettschneiderW.-D. (2013). Aufwachsen im Sport: Befunde einer 10-jährigen Längsschnittstudie zwischen Kindheit und Adoleszenz [Growing up with sport: Findings of a 10-year longitudinal study between childhood and adolescence]. Aachen, Germany: Meyer & Meyer.
20.
GhumanS.BehrmanJ. R.BorjaJ. B.GultianoS.KingE. M. (2005). Family background, service providers, and early childhood development in the Philippines: Proxies and interactions. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 54, 129–164.
21.
Grantham-McGregorS. (1995). A review of studies of the effect of severe malnutrition on mental development. The Journal of Nutrition, 125, 2233S–2238S.
22.
Grantham-McGregorS. (2002). Linear growth retardation and cognition. Lancet, 359, 542.
23.
HelmersC.PatnamM. (2011). The formation and evolution of childhood skill acquisition: Evidence from India. Journal of Development Economics, 95, 252–266.
24.
HornungB. R. (2006). Happiness and the pursuit of happiness: A sociocybernetic approach. Kybernetes, 35, 323–346.
25.
HuangH.HumphreysB. R. (2012). Sports participation and happiness: Evidence from US microdata. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33, 776–793.
26.
HuberM.LechnerM.SteinmayrA. (2015). Radius matching on the propensity score with bias adjustment: Tuning parameters and finite sample behaviour. Empirical Economics, 49, 1–31.
27.
HuberM.LechnerM.WunschC. (2013). The performance of estimators based on the propensity score. Journal of Econometrics, 175, 1–21.
28.
HumphreysB. R.RuseskiJ. E. (2011). An economic analysis of participation and time spent in physical activity. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 11, 1–38.
29.
ImbensG. W. (2004). Nonparametric estimation of average treatment effects under exogeneity: A review. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86, 4–29.
30.
ImbensG. W.WooldridgeJ. M. (2009). Recent developments in the econometrics of program evaluation. Journal of Economic Literature, 47, 5–86.
31.
JoffeM. M.Ten HaveT. R.FeldmanH. I.KimmelS. E. (2004). Model selection, confounder control, and marginal structural models: review and new applications. The American Statistician, 58, 272–279.
Ki-moonB. (2014b). United Nations secretary-general’s remarks at the event “celebrating sport for development and peace” on 28 April 2014. Retrieved March 20, 2015, fromhttp://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=7627
34.
KumraN. (2008). An assessment of the Young Lives sampling approach in Andhra Pradesh, India (Technical Note No. 2). Oxford, UK: University of Oxford.
35.
LechnerM. (2002). Some practical issues in the evaluation of heterogeneous labour market programmes by matching methods. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 165(1), 59–82.
36.
LechnerM. (2009). Long-run labour market and health effects of individual sports activities. The Journal of Health Economics, 28, 839–854.
37.
LechnerM.MiquelR.WunschC. (2011). Long-run effects of public sector sponsored training in West Germany. Journal of the European Economic Association, 9, 742–784.
38.
LipscombS. (2007). Secondary school extracurricular involvement and academic achievement: A fixed effects approach. Economics of Education Review, 26, 463–472.
39.
LordanG.FrijtersP. (2013). Unplanned pregnancy and the impact on sibling health outcomes. Health Economics, 22, 903–914.
40.
MacKinnonJ. G. (2006). Bootstrap methods in econometrics. The Economic Record, 82, S2–S18.
41.
McHaleS.CrouterA. C.TuckerC. J. (2001). Free-time activities in middle childhood: Links with adjustment in early adolescence. Child Development, 72, 1764–1778.
42.
OverstreetS.BraunS. (2000). Exposure to community violence and post-traumatic stress symptoms: Mediating factors. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 70, 263–271.
PfeiferC.CornelißenT. (2010). The impact of participation in sports on educational attainment—New evidence from Germany. Economics of Education Review, 29, 94–103.
45.
PutnamR. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
46.
PutnamR. (1995). Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. Political Science and Politics, 28, 664–683.
47.
RacineJ. S.MacKinnonJ. G. (2007). Inference via kernel smoothing of bootstrap P-values. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 51, 5949–5957.
48.
RosenbaumP.RubinD. (1983). The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika, 70, 41–55.
49.
RubinD. (1979). Using multivariate matched sampling and regression adjustment to control bias in observational studies. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 74, 318–328.
50.
ScheerderJ.TaksM.LagaeW. (2007). Teenage girls’ participation in sports. An integrational analysis of socio-cultural predictor variables. European Journal for Sport and Society, 4, 133–150.
51.
SeefeldtV. D.EwingM. E. (1997). Youth sports in America: An overview. President’s Council on Fitness and Sport: Research Digest, 2, 1–14.
52.
StevensonB. (2010). Beyond the classroom: Using title IX to measure the return to high school sport. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92, 284–301.
53.
VictoraC. G.AdairL.FallC.HallalP. C.MartorellR.RitcherL.SachdevH. S., for the Maternal and Child Undernutrition Study Group (2008). Maternal and child undernutrition: consequences for adult health and human capital. Lancet, 371, 340–357.
