Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how playing sports as a child affects wages once those children join the workforce. My hypothesis is that by playing sports at a young age, children develop valuable life skills that will help them be better workers and thus earn more. My theory is supported by work across disciplines that suggest playing youth sports has a positive effect on cognitive development, social skills, and work ethic. The logic behind this is if children playing sports give them more skills, making them more valuable workers, and increasing their marginal product of labor which is result in them demanding a higher wage. By running a regression between the effects of sports participation on wage with controls from the dataset such a race, sex, industry, marital status, health, and education, I was able to find that there is a large positive effect between youth participation and wages. This effect was partially validated by running an Oster test to show the robustness of uncontrolled variables.

Advisor

Davison, Colin

Department

Business Economics

Publication Date

2026

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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