Does Sport Affect Health and Well-Being or Is It the Other Way Around? A Note on Reverse-Causality in Empirical Applications

Estimating the causal impact of sport or physical activity on health and well-being is an issue of great relevance in the sport and health literature. The increasing availability of individual level data has encouraged this interest. However, this analysis requires dealing with two types of simultan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of sports economics Vol. 22; no. 2; pp. 218 - 226
Main Authors Guan, Jing, Tena, J. D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.02.2021
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Causality
SUR
structural models
simultaneity
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Summary:Estimating the causal impact of sport or physical activity on health and well-being is an issue of great relevance in the sport and health literature. The increasing availability of individual level data has encouraged this interest. However, this analysis requires dealing with two types of simultaneity problem: (1) between exercise and response variables; and (2) across the different response variables. This note discusses how the previous literature has dealt with these two questions with particular attention paid to the use of seemingly aseptic econometric models proposed by some recent empirical papers. Regardless of the approach, identification necessarily requires the use of untestable hypotheses. We provide some recommendations based on analyzing the robustness of the estimation results to changes in the adopted identification assumptions.
ISSN:1527-0025
1552-7794
DOI:10.1177/1527002520967400