Childhood Sporting Activities and Adult Labour-Market Outcomes

It is well known that non-cognitive skills are an important determinant

of success in life. However, there are difficulties in measuring

both skills and returns, which has hampered empirical work. We here

consider sports participation while at school as one way of improving

or signalling the individual’s non-cognitive skills endowment. We

use two waves of Add Health data to study how sports participation

by schoolchildren translates into adult labour-market outcomes. We

specifically test the hypotheses that participation in different types of

sports at school leads to, ceteris paribus, very different types of jobs

and labour-market insertion when adult. We take seriously the issue

of the endogeneity of sporting activities in order to tease out a causal

relationship between childhood sporting activity and adult labour market

success. As such, we contribute to the literature on the returns to

non-cognitive skills.