Does Sports Make People Happier, or Do Happy People More Sports?

Bruno Frey and Anthony Gullo

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: We contribute to the happiness literature by analyzing the causal relationship between sports and happiness. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio- Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find a positive correlation between sports participa- tion and reported life satisfaction. This relationship is stronger at younger and older ages than in middle age, and for people in bad health compared to those in average health. We further provide evidence for both causal directions. It turns out that the causal impact of engaging in sports on happiness is about four times higher than the effect of happiness on engaging in sports.

Keywords: happiness; life satisfaction; well-being; sports; causality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-isf, nep-ltv and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2021-30.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2021-30.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Sports Make People Happier, or Do Happy People More Sports? (2021)
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:cra:wpaper:2021-30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).