Empirical Evidence on Educational Effects of Physical Activity: Four Examples

Abstract

In this paper, we address the question of how physical activity of children and young adults affect their educational outcomes. To do so, we will take up four examples of our own work to illustrate different aspects of this research agenda. In contrast to the amazingly large literature on health effects, educational outcomes received much less attention. This is surprising given that building-up human capital is an undisputable and very expensive goal of (almost) all countries. Exploiting the ‘side-effects’ of sports and physical activity in this direction may be a cost-efficient way of improving the human capital of young people and thus increasing the future productivity of the economy. Three of the examples are based on German data, while one is based on Swiss data. Essentially, the three papers investigating the question of more versus less sports find that more sports is beneficial for cognitive skills (and some non-cognitive skills as well). Concerning the paper that compares sports activities to music related activities, the advantages of sports (compared to spending the time in structural music activity) on educational outcomes however cannot be established.