Sport and happiness: an evidence from football

Dieudonné Mignamissi, Eric Xaverie Possi Tebeng, Aristophane Djeufack Dongmo, Laquintine Mama Nji Mboumbouo

European Journal of Comparative Economics, 2025, vol. 22, issue 1, 77 - 127

Abstract: One of the beautiful things about football is that it brings people from all over the world together to share their love of the game. The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of football on happiness using the number of points a country has in FIFA. To achieve this, we specify and estimate a cross-sectional model based on a sample of 118 countries around the world. Our empirical strategy is twofold, based on Lewbel's (2012) OLS and two-stage least squares (2SLS). Overall, our results show that the number of points a country has following participation in the FIFA World Cup is positively correlated with happiness. This result remains robust when using GMM2S, IVTOBIT and censored quantile regression (CRQ) as alternative estimation techniques.

Keywords: happiness; football; cross-sectional model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 I31 Z20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:liu:liucej:v:22:y:2025:i:1:p:77-127

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