Do Sports Crowd Out Books? The Impact of Intercollegiate Athletic Participation on Grades

Michael Insler () and Jimmy Karam

Journal of Sports Economics, 2019, vol. 20, issue 1, 115-153

Abstract: We investigate the influence of intercollegiate athletic participation on grades using data from the U.S. Naval Academy. Athletic participation is an endogenous decision with respect to educational outcomes. To identify a causal effect, we develop an instrument via the Academy’s random assignment of students into peer groups. Instrumental variable (IVs) estimates suggest that sports participation modestly reduces recruited athletes’ grades. This finding has implications beyond college, as we also show that grades—not athletic participation—are most strongly associated with postcollegiate outcomes such as military tenure and promotion rates.

Keywords: higher education; human capital; sports; athletic participation; academic achievement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527002517716975 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jospec:v:20:y:2019:i:1:p:115-153

DOI: 10.1177/1527002517716975

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Sports Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().